Friend of the Devil

On a cliff edge overlooking the North Sea, a quadriplegic woman in a wheelchair stares unseeingly at the waves. She had been murdered. And, miles away, in a storeroom in the Maze, a medieval warren of yards and alleys at the heart of Eastvale, Yorkshire, a young woman lies sprawled on a heap of leather scraps. She too has been murdered. Their bodies are discovered at about the same time that DI Annie Cabbot, on secondment to the Eastern Area force, wakes with a severe hangover in the bed of a young man she barely recognizes. From these three strands, Peter Robinson seamlessly weaves a complex and compelling story.

Friend of the Devil is a superb showcase of how deftly Robinson balances horror with humour, police procedures with the nuances of all-too-human emotions, and endings with the promise of new starts. Once again, he transcends the usual limits of the genre in this dazzling novel about the obsessive power of vengeance.