All The Colours Of Darkness

The eagerly awaited new novel from Canada’s top crime-fiction writer. It’s the May half-term school holiday, and the first warm day of the year has drawn a few children to the River Swain for a swim. When one boy chases another off the path that runs alongside Hindswell Woods, a glimpse of orange through the trees tempts them into the shadows. Moments later, their high spirits vanish in an instant, for there, to their shock (and ghoulish fascination), they find a man in a brightly coloured shirt hanging from a branch by a rope around his neck. Alan Banks is in London with his new girlfriend when news of the kids’ ghastly discovery reaches the police in Eastvale, so the case falls to Annie Cabbot. And she’s mystified. Why would a successful set and costume designer, with a well-reviewed production of Othello currently playing, be in such despair that he would take his own life? In All the Colours of Darkness, Peter Robinson has written an exceptionally gripping and intricately plotted story that delivers hard truths about jealousy and betrayal — and of the insidious, corrosive power of secrets. Once more, Robinson proves that he is one of the finest crime-fiction writers in the world.

“The Alan Banks mystery-suspense novels are, simply put, the best series now on the market.” —Stephen King Peter Robinson is one of the very best in the crime fiction business—a teller of dark police tales who stands firmly in the bestseller ranks alongside Ian Rankin and Elizabeth George. In All the Colors of Darkness, the maestro whose masterworks Janet Maslin of the New York Times compares to “the masculine, brooding work of Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, George Pelecanos, and Jonathan Kellerman,” brings back his unforgettable series characters Yorkshire Chief Inspector Alan Banks and Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot. A gripping story with echoes of Shakespeare’s Othello set in our contemporary age of terrorist fears, All the Colors of Darkness supports the Miami Herald’s contention that “it’s a crime if you miss [this] author.”

The seventeenth installment of the internationally bestselling Inspector Banks series On a cliff edge overlooking the North Sea, a quadriplegic woman in a wheelchair stares unseeingly at the waves. She had been murdered. And, miles away, in a storeroom in the Maze, a medieval warren of yards and alleys at the heart of Eastvale, Yorkshire, a young woman lies sprawled on a heap of leather scraps. She too has been murdered. Their bodies are discovered at about the same time that DI Annie Cabbot, on secondment to the Eastern Area force, wakes with a severe hangover in the bed of a young man she barely recognizes. From these three strands, Peter Robinson seamlessly weaves a complex and compelling story. Friend of the Devil is a superb showcase of how deftly Robinson balances horror with humour, police procedures with the nuances of all-too-human emotions, and endings with the promise of new starts. Once again, he transcends the usual limits of the genre in this dazzling novel about the obsessive power of vengeance.

Once again, I have kept the demons at bay. As a wife and mother, Ruth knows her prayers are crucial to her family’s spiritual welfare. She stands between her precious children and the evil one, doing battle in prayer. She can’t afford to be careless. Thankfully, she has powerful allies: Pastor Glenn, New Life Christian School where her daughters Mary and Sarah attend, and the inner circle at Arbor Drive Fellowship. They all reinforce her careful nurturance of her children. If only her husband, Rick, understood that. He’s exasperated about the money Ruth keeps spending for the church and school. Doesn’t he see that these are their best defenses in shielding their children from the dangers of the world? But the forces that threaten Ruth’s faith, her family–her very life–are not the ones she expects. Ruth doesn’t realize that her heartfelt desire to obey God is mingled with dangerous currents of OCD–Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Her own strategies for protecting her family may be the very thing that tears them apart.

2019 First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association An “urgent and heartrending novel about an America on the brink” (Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood), They Come in All Colors follows a biracial teenage boy who finds his new life in the big city disrupted by childhood memories of the summer when racial tensions in his hometown reached a tipping point. It’s 1968 when fourteen-year-old Huey Fairchild begins high school at Claremont Prep, one of New York City’s most prestigious boys’ schools. His mother had uprooted her family from their small hometown of Akersburg, Georgia, leaving behind Huey’s white father and the racial unrest that ran deeper than the Chattahoochee River. But for our sharp-tongued protagonist, forgetting the past is easier said than done. At Claremont, where the only other nonwhite person is the janitor, Huey quickly realizes that racism can lurk beneath even the nicest school uniform. After a momentary slip of his temper, Huey finds himself on academic probation and facing legal charges. With his promising school career in limbo, he begins to reflect on his memories of growing up in Akersburg during the Civil Rights Movement—and the chilling moments leading up to his and his mother’s flight north. With Huey’s head-shaking antics fueling this coming-of-age narrative, the novel triumphs as a tender and honest exploration of race, identity, family, and homeland, and a work that is “emotionally acute…eye-opening and rewarding for a wide range of readers” (Library Journal, starred review).