‘The Alan Banks mystery-suspense novels are the best series on the market. Try one and tell me I'm wrong’ Stephen King

Dry Bones That Dream is the seventh novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from Wednesday's Child.

A CONTRACT KILLING. A SECRET PAST. BANKS IS PUSHED TO HIS LIMIT.

2.47 a.m. Chief Inspector Alan Banks sees the body of Keith Rothwell for the first time. Only hours earlier two masked men had walked the mild-mannered accountant out of his farmhouse to the barn. They then clinically executed him with a shotgun.

Clearly this is a professional hit – but Keith was hardly the sort of person to make deadly enemies. Or was he? The police investigation soon raises more questions than answers.

The more Banks scratches the surface, the more he wonders what lies beneath the veneer of the apparently happy Rothwell family. And when his old sparring partner Detective Superintendent Richard Burgess arrives from Scotland Yard, the case takes yet another unexpected twist . . .

Dry Bones That Dream is followed by the eighth book in this Yorkshire-based crime series, Innocent Graves.