I'm a Wednesday's child but I don't think I exemplify the "Wednesday's child is full of woe" aphorism. I am generally a pretty optimistic, glass half full kind of person. However, the Wednesday's child of this story, Gemma Scupham, really did have a life full of woe.

DI Alan Banks and DC Susan Gay interviewed Gemma's mother, Brenda, in her home after she reported Gemma missing. She told them that two well-dressed people, a man and a woman, had come to the home the previous day and said they were social workers investigating allegations of abuse. They told Brenda they would have to take Gemma away overnight and would return the next day with her. When they didn't show up she called the police. Banks superior officer, DS Gristhorpe, decided to beome personally involved in this case. He had been a member of the force when the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, kidnapped and killed a number of young girls and he has been haunted by them ever since. When a body is discovered in an abandoned mine works by some tourists who saw only a hand under a pile of stones the police fear that it is Gemma. However, it was an adult male who had been stabbed. Gristhorpe decides Banks should head up this investigation while he concentrates on the search for Gemma. Of course, there is a connection between the two cases and dogged police work uncovers the link and that sets them on the path to solving both crimes. Jenny Fuller, a psychologist working at a nearby university, also provides some useful background on psychopaths. The ending took me by surprise.

We got a better feel for DI Banks relationship with his wife in this book and also with his kids. His son is living away from home now, in his first year of college. His daughter is more interested in boys and clothes and makeup than before. Banks and his wife are facing the prospect of an empty nest. I know from reading later books in this series that they separate and his wife returns to London. Did they find they didn't have much in common once the children were gone? ( )

A young woman has had her 7-year-old daughter taken into custody by a pair of social workers, only to realize later that they have actually abducted the little girl. Some mother we are dealing with here. Seems that this glowing example of motherhood had never really warmed up to the child to begin with, so it was no surprise that she is reluctant to report the crime to the police. Eventually Inspector Alan Banks is called to investigate. Then an unrelated crime, a vicious murder, gets his intention. The question becomes are they unrelated? This is one of my long-time favorite series, partly for the well-drawn characters, partly for the complex plots, and of course for the setting in the Yorkshire Dales of Great Britain. Wednesday’s Child (the name derives from the rhyme, said child being “full of woe”) contains all those qualities, plus some interesting insights into Inspector Banks and his superior officer, Superintendent Gristhorpe. It isn't particularly necessary to have read the previous novels in the series to enjoy this one...but each one is a special treat. ( )

Wednesday’s Child (1992) is the sixth of Peter Robinson’s twenty-seven Inspector Banks novels. Even though I have already read the latest three novels in the series, it was not until I decided to start reading the Banks series from the beginning, and got into book number five (Past Reason Hated), that I finally began to much warm up to Banks and his crew. Robinson, to that point, seemed content to write very good, straightforward police procedurals more than the kind of crime book that most appeals to me: those in which the main and supporting characters are so fully developed that I can begin predicting their reactions to whatever situation they confront in each new novel. Simply put, that’s when it all becomes real to me.

Wednesday’s Child picks up much from where the previous novel ended. Alan Banks, now forty years old, is still happy with his decision to have left London for the slower pace of life he and his family enjoy in northern England. His home life, however, is not what he wishes it were now that his son has begun university studies half way across the country and his daughter much prefers the company of her teenaged friends to that of her parents. And now, Banks’s wife seems to blame his impatience for much of the friction between them and their daughter. It doesn’t help, of course, that Banks often works the kind of hours that cause him and his wife to live almost separate lives for weeks at a time.

But first and foremost, Alan Banks is a cop who tends to take crimes committed on his home turf personally — especially those crimes that victimize children. When seven-year-old Gemma Scupham is taken from her home by fake social care workers, Banks knows that if he doesn’t find the little girl quickly, he will almost certainly never find her alive. He also knows that Gemma is not being held for ransom because the girl’s mother, who depends on government payments for support, is incapable of paying any ransom at all to get her daughter back. So now, considering what is likely happening to the little girl, it is all hands on deck. Even Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, more administrator than field investigator these days, is back in the field.

After a body is discovered by sheer chance inside a remote, abandoned mine, Banks is removed from the kidnapping case so that he can handle the murder investigation. But then something strange happens. Some of the same names, and leads, begin to appear in both investigations — and if the little girl has any chance of survival, Banks and Gristhorpe know that it will take their combined efforts to save her. The race is on.

Bottom Line: The Inspector Banks series is not one I might still be reading if I had first begun reading the books in the order in which they were published. I am grateful that I started the series from the wrong end, after Banks had become more of a fleshed-out character than he is in the early books. Take this as the word of encouragement it is meant to be: the Alan Banks character should not be given up on too soon because like me, in the end, you just might start calling Alan Banks one of your favorite fictional detectives of them all. ( )

Published in 1992, “Wednesday's Child” came relatively early in Peter Robinson's terrific series of Inspector Banks novels, a series still going strong.

As usual Banks and his team of investigators have two major crimes — perhaps related, perhaps not — to deal with at the same time. (How the English village of Eastvale can have so many major crimes is a mystery itself, on a par with the many murders that occur in Jane Marple's quaint village of St. Mary Mead.) A young couple pose as social workers and take away a woman's seven-year-old daughter, Gemma, supposedly because of suspected child abuse. Then the body of a man knifed to death is found.

At this point early in the series, Alan Banks is still just the No. 2 man among Eastvale investigators. In charge, though nearing retirement, is Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, who for personal reasons decides to take charge of the kidnapping case, leaving the murder to Banks. Readers follow both investigations step by step, waiting to see if the two paths connect.

Except for the abundance of evil in Eastvale, these books suggest realism throughout: believable characters, believable crimes, believable detective work and finally a believable outcome. Unusual for the series, “Wednesday's Child” includes both a chase and a shootout, yet even these seem real.

This novel will satisfy all those Robinson fans who, like me, get to it late. ( )

Synopsis: When a well-dressed couple, claiming to be social workers, appear at Brenda Scupham's door, saying they must take her seven-year-old daughter, Gemma, into care after allegations of abuse, Brenda is confused and intimidated enough to hand the child over. But when the couple, Mr. Brown and Miss Peterson, fail to bring Gemma home, Brenda realizes she has made a terrible mistake. As the days go by, Detective Chief Inspector Banks begins to lose hope of finding Gemma alive. Then a rambler finds a body in the ruins of an old lead mine, and the two cases begin to converge in a terrifying way, leading Banks to a showdown with one of the most chillingly evil criminals he has ever come up against.
Review: As a sign of the times, the hero smokes incessantly - this is really annoying because it adds nothing to the story. I was surprised at the ending - also a sign of the times in which the book was written. ( )