Abattoir Blues

Canada's premier, bestselling crime fiction writer, Peter Robinson gets better and better. The twenty-second book in the much-loved Inspector Banks series -- that has sold more than ten million copies worldwide -- will appeal to readers of Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly.     The story begins with a stolen tractor, hardly a job for DCI Banks and his Homicide and Major Crimes team, but the new police commissioner has put rural crime high on her agenda. At the same time, an apparent crime scene is discovered in an old hangar at an abandoned World War II airfield. In addition, two local lads are missing. One of them lives in a caravan, which is burned to the ground one night, and the other's girlfriend receives an unwelcome visit from someone impersonating a police officer. Just as Banks and his team are getting a grip on all these incidents, a motor accident in a freak hailstorm turns up a gruesome discovery that spins the investigation into high gear. Soon it seems that not even the investigators themselves are safe during the race against time that follows.