Wednesday's Child - Peter Robinson

Wednesday’s Child (1992) is the sixth of Peter Robinson’s twenty-seven Inspector Banks novels. Even though I have already read the latest three novels in the series, it was not until I decided to start reading the Banks series from the beginning, and got into book number five (Past Reason Hated), that I finally began to much warm up to Banks and his crew. Robinson, to that point, seemed content to write very good, straightforward police procedurals more than the kind of crime book that most appeals to me: those in which the main and supporting characters are so fully developed that I can begin predicting their reactions to whatever situation they confront in each new novel. Simply put, that’s when it all becomes real to me.

Wednesday’s Child picks up much from where the previous novel ended. Alan Banks, now forty years old, is still happy with his decision to have left London for the slower pace of life he and his family enjoy in northern England. His home life, however, is not what he wishes it were now that his son has begun university studies half way across the country and his daughter much prefers the company of her teenaged friends to that of her parents. And now, Banks’s wife seems to blame his impatience for much of the friction between them and their daughter. It doesn’t help, of course, that Banks often works the kind of hours that cause him and his wife to live almost separate lives for weeks at a time. 

But first and foremost, Alan Banks is a cop who tends to take crimes committed on his home turf personally — especially those crimes that victimize children. When seven-year-old Gemma Scupham is taken from her home by fake social care workers, Banks knows that if he doesn’t find the little girl quickly, he will almost certainly never find her alive. He also knows that Gemma is not being held for ransom because the girl’s mother, who depends on government payments for support, is incapable of paying any ransom at all to get her daughter back. So now, considering what is likely happening to the little girl, it is all hands on deck. Even Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, more administrator than field investigator these days, is back in the field. 

After a body is discovered by sheer chance inside a remote, abandoned mine, Banks is removed from the kidnapping case so that he can handle the murder investigation. But then something strange happens. Some of the same names, and leads, begin to appear in both investigations — and if the little girl has any chance of survival, Banks and Gristhorpe know that it will take their combined efforts to save her. The race is on.

Bottom Line: The Inspector Banks series is not one I might still be reading if I had first begun reading the books in the order in which they were published. I am grateful that I started the series from the wrong end, after Banks had become more of a fleshed-out character than he is in the early books. Take this as the word of encouragement it is meant to be: the Alan Banks character should not be given up on too soon because like me, in the end, you just might start calling Alan Banks one of your favorite fictional detectives of them all. 

Peter Robinson