The circumstances surrounding Caroline’s life and death provide a challenge for Banks and Gay to discover the killer. As a child, Caroline had been abused by her father until she ran away to London as a teenager where she adoped the lifestyle of a prostitute. In more recent years, she has been working as an actress in amateur productions, and living in a lesbian relationship with Veronica Shildon, a woman who has left her husband, a classical composer, for Caroline.

There is no shortage of suspects with diverse motives for killing Caroline in what was obviously a crime of passion done with an instrument readily at hand. Sorting through the list, establishing alibis, and probably learning more about Caroline’s life than he ever wanted to know, Banks with help from Gay, makes sense of the complex puzzle that was Caroline Hartley.

Past Reason Hated is a reissue of the first of Peter Robinson’s books featuring Alan Banks. Originally published in 1991, the story itself has aged well. There is little to indicate, other than the use of a stereo rather than a CD player, that the action is taking place ten years ago. Since Robinson relies more heavily on people and relationships rather than technology to create his story, it is less likely to appear somewhat dated.

It is easy to see why the series has been so successful. Robinson includes all the necessary ingredients for a first class crime novel. The plotting is skillful and tight. Every scene has a reason for taking place, and seemingly unrelated happenings result in a cohesive whole by the final page of the book. All of the characters are well thought out. Alan Banks and Susan Gay are not the only true to life individuals in the story. The victim, who is dead when the reader first makes her acquaintance, is revealed as a tortured soul through accounts of those with whom she interacted in her life. Even the peripheral characters such as Caroline’s brother and father emerge as distinct personalities.

Mr. Robinson treats the reader to an insightful tour of several parts of Britain. The Yorkshire countryside is not only well painted physically, but the mannerisms and lifestyles of its inhabitants are vividly portrayed. To follow Caroline’s history Banks must travel to London, which provides the author with an opportunity to describe the big city and compare living and working in London with that of the small town Eastvale in Yorkshire.

Past Reason Hated can probably be categorized as a police procedural, but to label it as such is doing the novel a great injustice. We do, of course, see how the Eastvale police do their jobs, but the characters and setting are made so realistic that the book becomes much more interesting than merely watching Banks and his staff track down an evil doer. Reading or rereading Mr. Robinson’s first book allows one to notice how the author’s skill has developed over the series. He started out with this admirable effort, but his more recent effort, In a Dry Season is definitely a step above.

--Andy Plonka