Friend of the devil — book review
Friend Of The Devil by Peter Robinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A student is murdered in “The Maze”, a rundown area near the centre of Eastvale, and Detective Superintendent Alan Banks is looking for the killer. His colleague Annie Cabbot, seconded to another division, is called to investigate the murder of a disabled inmate of a home in the coastal town of Whitby. Subsequent investigations reveal links between the two cases, which have historical roots going back to previous cases, and events in described in some of Robinson’s earlier books.
As a police procedural/whodunit it is up to Peter Robinson‘s usual high standards for the most part, though it seemed to get off to a rather shaky start. Having been a student myself, albeit a long time ago, I’m pretty sure that if one of my friends had disappeared after we’d been to pubs in town, we would have been very concerned about it, and would have been anxious to contact the police before they contacted us (though in South Africa in those days we might also have considered the possibility that the police themselves might have been responsible for the disappearance). So there is an air of unreality about the first few chapters of the story, where the friends of the missing student seem quite uncaring, and even after discovering that she was murdered, seem reluctant to get involved.
Though Peter Robinson lives in Canada his books, set in Yorkshire, have generally seemed fairly authentic to me. But in this one I noticed a transatlantic drift. He used “momentarily” in the American sense of “in a moment” rather than the more usual one of “for a moment”, and also used “moot” in a transatlantic sense of “not worth debating” rather than “debatable”. Most notably several of the characters are described as rolling their eyes.
Now it’s quite a long time since I lived in the UK, and for all I know people there may have adopted eye-rolling widely, and similarly the other modes of expression, but it struck me as a bit out of place.
Notes from underground 
for all I know people there may have adopted eye-rolling widely
We haven’t.