Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson

Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson
Buy Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Crime
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: The 21st book in Peter Robinson's DCI Alan Banks series makes for a reasonable if wordy read and looks at the knotty problem of students claiming that their teacher has made sexual advances.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 416/12h59m	Date: January 2014
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1444704938
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A disgraced college lecturer, apparently in difficult financial circumstances, was found murdered on a disused railway line near his home - only he had £5000 in cash in his pocket. Four years earlier he'd been dismissed from his job for sexual misconduct and since then he'd been living a poverty-stricken existence with little contact with anyone, which wasn't difficult, considering how isolated his cottage was from any other dwellings, or even roads. There are almost too many suspects, ranging from people at the college where he used to teach to people who knew him when he was a student at Essex university back in the seventies. There's even a connection to the miners' strike which happened around that time. The trouble is that no one seems to have a compelling motive for the murder - but he didn't kill himself.

This was a reasonable read, but by no means one of Robinson's best books, although I do accept that this might partly be down to bias on my part. On occasions I became annoyed by the constant references to music and to alcohol - neither of which grab me as subjects for discussion. To the right reader it might have been riveting, but for me it felt like padding. On the other hand it was intriguing to see how the detectives made the jump back to Essex in the seventies and the miners' strike - connections which I could never have seen. I was also pleased to read about the 1972 strike when emphasis is usually placed on the disastrous 1984 strike.

In each novel - certainly in the later books in the series - Robinson seems to take a subject which is engaging public attention and weaves it into the story. This time it's the problem of teachers, or lecturers taking sexual advantage of their students. What did strike me was that even if the teacher is innocent it's very difficult to prove and in just about every case some suspicion is going to linger. Power rests with the students and not with their teachers in this area, but it's difficult to see how that could be made fairer.

Rather than read the book I listened to an audio download (which I bought myself) narrated by Simon Slater. I like his range of voices: unusually for a man his female voices are particularly well done and I was never is any doubt as to which character was speaking and I was rather sorry when we got to the end.

The books all read reasonably well as stand alones, but if you'd prefer to read them in order (I must admit that it is better) than you'll find a complete list here.

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