The Hanging Valley

Finished a Peter Robinson thriller, The Hanging Valley, while having my hair colored for the first time in 8 months. I've been coloring my hair for the past 8 years or so -- reddish highlights, not a whole-hog color-changing thing -- and it still feels like an almost sinful extravagance. Except in the past year or so, I've begun to get gray hair that really shows against the dark brown, so it's moved from a total vanity to a vanity that's almost demanded by the NYC job market. (What a rationalization that is. But still, the gray looks sloppy.)(Whither my feminist ideals?)

Anyway, The Hanging Valley features Robinson's Chief Inspector Alan Banks doing his detective thing against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Dales, a landscape that I recently saw a glimpse of in a totally unrelated work, Michael Apted's most excellent 7 Up documentary series in which one of the characters is a farm boy from up north. The Dales appears to be lonely, beautiful country, and that's how Robinson describes it in his mysteries. In this particular installment, a body is discovered in a valley whose geologic designation is a "hanging valley" due to how it was originally formed by a glacier, or so I loosely gather from Robinson's description. Since it's the 2nd murder in five years in the town of Swainsdale, the local police take an interest. Repressive religion, Canada, and the class system all enter into the plot. Banks is an appealing hero, although why detectives so frequently have "loner" and "music lover" and often "smoker" as their default settings, I'm not sure.

After I finished the Robinson, I read a bit more of Six Frigates on the subway ride home -- a good one, on an express train with lots of seating.