All the Colours of Darkness: DCI Banks 18

Product Information

The chapters in the wrecked base, in which Darzek gets to know the five aliens and struggles to figure out a way to save himself and his new friends without breaking the Code, are the best part of the book.

Similarly, I think he is trying to go for a hyper-observant effect by choosing irrelevant crap and then describing it in completely excessive detail. Banks had plenty of time off due to him, and she herself had recently got back from a two-week stay with her father in Saint Ives, mostly sketching and lounging around on the beach, convalescing and recharging after a traumatic period in her life. Set designer Mark Hardcastle’s hanging in Hindswell Woods certainly looks like a suicide, his only wounds from a noose tied by someone left-handed, like Hardcastle himself.I will say we have a lot of science fiction, and a lot of mysteries, a lot of them from certain authors. Some years ago he had travelled for the Foreign Office; no stretch of the imagination to see that his continued absences abroad meant he is still working as a spy.

Here, then, is the truth about the Covent Garden opera diva and the 17th reindeer, the body that falls from the Tate Gallery, the ordinary London street corner where strange accidents keep occurring, the consul’s son discovered buried in the unit’s basement, the corpse pulled from a swamp of Chinese dinners.Opening day in New York City was a tremendous success, with throngs of travelers crowding into the terminal.

AUDIO: The reading would have been quite adequate except for some insane -- literally insane -- music stuck in at odd moments. Another aspect is that Banks has a younger girlfriend who is precious about a whole lot of small brittle treasures and artworks; this description of the items immediately told me they were being introduced only to be smashed.Usually I'm gripped by Robinson's writing within a few chapters, but it took a lot longer before I really got into this one. Robinson obviously has larger issues he wants to address in this book, but in doing so, I think he has written a book that falls short of the standards he set earlier in the series, and I hope that he will allow Banks and Cabbot to get back into their usual routines ASAP. Even if SF is a literature of ideas, as some have argued, it can be hard for new and exciting ideas to stand on their own without some kind of artistry or passion to generate feeling in the reader.