If you enjoy England and crime stories, you’ll want to read Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks Mysteries. Though an older book, Wednesday’s Child has a timely topic: child abduction and abuse.

To be honest, I was not sure at first that I would be able to stomach reading the entire tale, but the horrors that some sick creatures visit upon innocents was alluded to rather than described. The same cannot be said of the gruesome murder of one of the less likeable characters inhabiting the small Yorkshire town of Eastvale; nonetheless, the pace of the investigation, the descriptions of an early autumn in northern England, and the thoughts and lives of the coppers trying desperately to track down the perpetrators in the slim hope of finding the child alive kept me turning the pages with the same bleak hope in my own heart. Along the way, I glimpsed small-town life in modern England and the lifestyles of rich and poor in a region steeped in the past while being dragged into the present.

Do you enjoy tales of crime? Do descriptions of Olde England make you long to visit villages with names like Hutton-le-Hole and enjoy a pint or a cuppa in the Queen’s Arms pub?