Chief Inspector Alan Banks faces his most personal case, from New York Times best-selling author Peter Robinson. A bullet to the brain abruptly halted a terrified young woman's desperate flight. In her pocket is the name of a policeman whose own life was brutally invaded, mercilessly shaken, and very nearly erased - a policeman who has since gone missing. The dead woman in the car had been running from something - but she didn't run far or fast enough....

"A dedicated man--a former university professor, wealthy historian and archaeologist who loved his adopted village--is dead in the wild outdoors. It is a particularly heinous slaying, considering the esteem in which the victim, Harry Steadman, was held by his colleagues--by everyone, it seems, except the one person who bludgeoned the life out of the respected scholar and left him half-buried in a farmer's field. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks...

"A disgraced college lecturer is found murdered on a disused railway line near his home. He has 5,000 euros in his pocket, yet in the four years since his dismissal has been living a poverty-stricken and hermit-like existence. There are many suspects, mostly at the college where he used to teach, but Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, much to the chagrin of his boss, soon becomes fixated on Lady Veronica Chalmers, who appears to have links with...

"Two women. Two crimes. The first is a poet claiming she was assaulted decades earlier by a man now regarded as one of the country's national treasures. And the second is a girl found on a remote roadside, her body broken, her life snuffed out. For Alan Banks, newly promoted to Detective Superintendent, the first case rips a tunnel into long-ago days of innocence and discovery, of music and light. And in the victim, he sees an opportunity for magic...

"Two suspicious deaths challenge DS Alan Banks and his crack investigative team. A young local student's body is found in an abandoned car on a lonely country road. The death looks like suicide, but there are too many open questions for Banks and his team to rule out foul play. The victim didn't own a car. She didn't even drive. How did she get there? Where--and when--did she die? Did someone move her, and if so, why? A man in his sixties is found...

"In November 1980, Nick Hartley returns home from a university lecture to find his house crawling with police. His ex-girlfriend, Alice Poole, has been found murdered, and her new boyfriend Mark Woodcroft is missing. Nick is the prime suspect. The case quickly goes cold, but Nick cannot let it go. He embarks on a career in investigative journalism, determined to find Alice's murderer--but his obsession leads him down a dangerous path. Decades later,...