I think Playing With Fire is something like book number fourteen in the Inspector Banks series and it’s the latest edition out in paperback. Banks is on the case of an arsonist who’s killed two people in a barge fire as the novel starts. As usual, we get to meet a colourful handful of likely candidates and there are a few twists before a few hundred pages later we reach a conclusion.
I’ve now read the last five novels, and there’s a new hardback out in January, while I’ve missed a non-Banks paperback (the Amazon review that’s there at the moment doesn’t make it likely I’ll be rushing either), and we’re still due a mass market paperback edition of some collected stories that were published a couple of months ago.
Why all this publishing at the same time? Well this story from earlier in the year goes some way to explaining it. Despite his phenomenal sales, Robinson hasn’t actually had all his books published yet in the UK (he resides in Canada). I don’t know if there’s a time limit that Pan Macmillan are working to, but it must have something to do with it all.
But back to the book. I did enjoy it, but I just felt that some things seemed to be mentioned a couple too many times. It’s almost as if we’re hostage to some of the slow readers at the back of the class who may not recall something that happened a hundred pages earlier. But I’ll be reading the next Banks novel, and have plenty of back copies to get through.
Incidentally, I think that my reading this is testament to the fact that Ottakers occassional 99p book promotions really do work!