WEDNESDAY'S CHILD

There's precious little time for Yorkshire Inspector Alan Banks's worries about his distant wife or teenage daughter; he's hot on the trail of the couple, plausibly masquerading as social workers, who took 7-year-old Gemma Scupham away from her slatternly mother. When a family touring the nearby lead mines discovers, not Gemma's body, but that of ex-convict Carl Johnson, the trail seems cold; but after Banks' tense, inconclusive confrontation with Johnson's boss, diamond magnate Adam Harkness, and the disheartening discovery of Gemma's clothing thirty miles away, Constable Susan Gay ties Johnson to Gemma- -and to Jeremy ``Smiler'' Chivers, a grinning psychopath who seems all too good a suspect. Expert lesser work from Robinson (Past Reason Hated, 1993, etc.): an unsurprising but thoroughly accomplished British procedural that puts its lowlife denizens through their paces with all the withering mastery of a lion tamer.