All the Colours of Darkness: DCI Banks 18

Product Information

When she makes those flippant remarks to her son over coffee one Friday, she has no inkling that within a few hours she will be facing the most terrifying situation of her life. The apparent murder/suicide of a gay couple looks kind of straightforward, but Banks has a "Othello"-based suspicion; that someone prompted the jealousy that brought the horrible chain of events on. It also portrays the intelligence services of Britain as having no intelligence at all, so if you're the type who would get a big chuckle out of that, you might find that entertaining all by itself. As in Heinlein's 1955 Tunnel in the Sky, the teleporters in All the Colors of Darkness are a bunch of doorways in a Grand Central Terminal-style concourse; the big difference is that while in the Heinlein book teleportation is expensive, here costs are negligible.

In the subplot, a minor police case moves along briskly with a new-in-town local gangster beaten to submission as the main case - presented as a gay murder-suicide - moves to an obvious and unsatisfying conclusion. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.Teleportation is the first step to interstellar travel, and if Earthling men and women, Jews and Muslims, blacks and whites, etc. It also means that reading his books and meeting a familar character becomes like catching up with an old friend. The cover text doesn't stress the detective angle, and I guess I figured Darzek would be a scientist, or soldier, or astronaut, or just some guy upon whom adventure had been thrust. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. This is a somewhat confused crime tale as Banks investigates a hanging which seems to be part of a murder-suicide case.

But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. A beautiful June day in the Yorkshire Dales, and a group of children are spending the last of their half-term freedom swimming in the river near Hindswell Woods. Annie Cabbot, as usual, is drawn in by the charisma of her boss, and puts her career, and her life, on the line.Too many questions are left unanswered to suit Banks' "copper's curiosity," and soon the stubborn and diligent chief inspector embarks on a further investigation -- unofficial -- into the untimely deaths of the two gay lovers.