Careless Love is the 25th(!) book in Peter Robinson’s long-running DCI Alan Banks series set in northern England. Banks is clearly the main character but Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot, Detective Sargeant Winsome Jackson and Detective Constable Geraldine (Gerry) Masterson also have significant roles in this entry.
The Banks books are straightforward police procedural murder mysteries. After 25 books we the reader have become used to the POV of Banks, his obsession with 1960s rock-n-roll and classical music and his appreciation for good looking women (despite his abominable track record in maintaining romantic relationships with them). The latter characteristic becomes of particular significance in Careless Love because the first dead bodies that show up are of a young beautiful 2nd-year University student and an older, wealthy businessman. Additionally, there is another plot thread of Annie’s father’s new girlfriend (who happens to be a stunningly beautiful Eastern European woman younger than his daughter) and has a connection to sex trafficking and may have a lead on finding a villain from a prior Robinson novel who escaped capture after setting a potentially deadly trap for Banks and abusing Annie.
The exploitation and despoliation of women and women’s bodies is definitely a theme of the book, which Robinson makes thuddingly clear by having Banks cogitate about these ideas during his off-duty downtime (while he inevitably drinks wine and listens to a particularly itemized musical sequence. It’s somewhat curious Robinson uses his primary male character to hammer home his thoughts and feelings about this injustice instead of taking advantage of his all-female team of supporting characters to do so.
Careless Love is an unusual entry into the Banks series because even though the primary mysteries are resolved (somewhat lazily I would argue) for the first time I can remember in the series one of the main plot threads is deliberately left undone, clearly indicating a continuation of the story will be occurring in the next Banks mystery. This is odd because although the 25 books in the series clearly have a sequential order to them (detailing Banks promotion from Detective Inspector in Book 1 to his current title of Chief Superintendent as well as the destabilization and dissolution of his marriage and subsequent maturation of his kids) they have always been standalone books; Careless Love isn’t really like that since there’s clearly more story to come that didn’t fit in this book. We do find out what happened to produce the first two bodies in the book but the sex-trafficking stories is specifically left hanging. Is this a device to raise interest in the next Banks book? Possibly, but it also short changes readers who invested their time in reading THIS Banks book.
Overall, even with this questionable plot decision, Careless Love is better than some of the most recent Banks books (Book 21 and 22 seemed perfunctory but the last 2-3 have been quite good) but I think it could have been better by making larger use of the supporting characters (especially DS Winsome and DC Gerry) and skipping the details of Banks’ listening habits (not a chapter goes by without a superfluous listing of albums and songs). However, the satisfaction of the revelation of “whodunit” and “howdunit” make this a pleasant genre read.
RATING: 3.5 STARS.
Title: Careless Love.
Author: Peter Robinson.
Paperback: 352 pages.
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton.
Date Published: July 26, 2018.
Date Read: March 20, 2019.
GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5.0).
OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.5/4.0).
PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B.
WRITING: A-.
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