PLAYING WITH FIRE

Everyone in Eastvale, it seems, has something to hide when DCI Alan Banks tackles a nasty case that combines arson and art fraud.

The burning of two boats, along with low-flying painter Tom McMahon and druggie Tina Aspern, raises questions right from the start. Which of the rickety barges they were squatting on was the firebug’s primary target? And why did Andrew Hurst, the fussy local collector who reported the blaze, bicycle out from his shack to watch it before phoning the firefighters? But Hurst is only the first of a parade of suspicious characters. There’s Leslie Whitaker, the used bookseller who piously insists he doesn’t know a thing about the Turneresque watercolors Tom was turning out on antique paper he bought from Whitaker. There’s Danny Boy Corcoran, Tina’s drug connection. There’s troubled Mark Siddons, the remorseful day laborer who’d quarreled with Tina and left her alone on the boat, and there’s Dr. Patrick Aspern, the chilly stepfather she’d accused of driving her from home by abusing her repeatedly. Even Phil Keane, the London art authenticator who’s been dating Banks’s colleague and ex-lover DI Annie Cabbot, starts to look suspicious to the jealous Banks. Whom can he trust to tell the truth about this hydra-headed case?

As in Close to Home (2003), Robinson’s customary insight into the wavering line between normalcy and unblinking evil is intensified by a sins-of-the-fathers fatalism. P.D. James, meet Ross Macdonald.