Peter Robinson: Aftermath

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In an ordinary house in Yorkshire, five young women, all runaways, are found in a cellar. All but one are dead. They have been tortured, physically and sexually. The ceilings are covered in mirrors.

In a room off the cellar, Inspector Banks discovers what looks like a clump of little mushrooms growing in the earth floor. It turns out to be a cluster of toes. The neighbours hadn't noticed a thing.

If that all sounds far-fetched, remember the Wests, that couple who entered our nightmares, who lived in a house in an ordinary suburb and buried girls in the basement.

Robinson gives a pretty big clue about the way this is going to go in his prefaced acknowledgments: in understanding the "killer couple" phenomenon, he writes, he read Brian Masters' She Must Have Known and Gordon Burns' Happy Like Murderers. Note to publisher: put the acknowledgments at the back of the book next time.

Not that it matters too much, even if you've been given that whopping clue, because Aftermath, carried by the tormented Laphroaig-drinking Banks, is one of the best of the serial-killer genre. There's the satisfying tension of a sub-plot in which the young woman constable who witnesses her partner hacked to death by the killer in turn beats to death the murderer - she then finds herself on a murder charge.

And Robinson's characters, from psycho to saint, are skilfully drawn.

You just have to hope you'll never have any of them living next door to you.

Macmillan

$34.95