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All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson (view source)
Revision as of 08:16, 27 December 2014
, 08:16, 27 December 2014no edit summary
It was family money which meant that one of the victims was able to live in quiet luxury. His Civil Service pay as a member of the Security Services wouldn't have made it possible, although spies have been known to feather their own nests out of the money which doesn't get accounted for on their operations. Co-incidentally, Banks' girlfriend was in Bonn at the same time as Laurence Silbert – her father was a diplomat in the Bonn embassy before it moved to Berlin. Once again I felt that tug of familiarity as I wanted to enquire if he remembered my daughter who was a Second Secretary there at the time.
The Security Services will be interested when one of their own – even if nominally retired – is murdered. I might be innocent in these matters but I did feel that the portrayal of if the Security Services was extreme, almost intentionally scary and I had to suspend belief. The theme of manipulation to commit a crime was far more subtly handled, from the staging of ''Othello'' to the consideration of how this might work in a gay relationship. It was thought provoking that someone who produced the situation in which crimes were committed might not actually have committed any crime.
The story is a page-turner but I'll confess to not being surprised by the ending. Marcel Berlins writing in ''The Times'' has said that ''Peter Robinson has for too long, and unfairly, been in the shadow of Ian Rankin…'' Rankin has dominated the genre for more than a decade and with good reason. At his [[The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin|best]] his writing was superb, his plotting tight and controlled, his characters people you expected to see when you looked up from the book. Robinson is good, very good, but I'm afraid that he's not quite in Rankin's class although it has to be said that he's done well to keep the freshness of Alan Banks after a long run of books.