BEAST OF BURDEN by Ray Banks

Usually I leave a book to one side for a while before trying to review it. I like to let my thoughts settle. Hot off reading BEAST OF BURDEN, though, I thought I’d go straight into it without any planning.

Call it a Callum Innes tribute review.

I’m thinking I’ll drop two big clunking cliché’s in the review, but I’ll give you fair warning before I do. After reading the third Inns book, NO MORE HEROES, I wasn’t sure there would be another. Without wanting to spoil things, Banks made some very bold choices at the end of that book, and made it difficult to understand how the character would carry a fourth crime novel.
But that is the silly thinking of an idiot. What Ray and Cal prove here is that, as with Matt Scudder, the time a character gets most interesting is just when you think his story is done.

(Here’s one of those clunking cliché things, duck!)
So, that brings us to the fourth book in the Cal Innes Quartet. There’s a lot of baggage carried over through the series and it set the plot up here for a great ending. There’s death and violence, swearing, and some of the best dialogue of the series.

Every character from the previous books gets an appearance (or at least a mention), and they all get to leave the series in ways that feel natural and unforced.
Innes is typically messed up. Even more so than before, to the point where he seems to have moved past looking for a fight, to now looking to cover up and avoid a beating. It’s hard to think of a central character that’s been on a more complete journey. As usual, there’s a degree of hidden greatness to Cal’s actions. He’s a fuck up who makes the wrong choices, but he’s often doing things for almost the right reasons.
Throughout the series, he’s never been as fast or as clever as he thinks he is. Never one step ahead of anyone. The extra dimension here is that Banks switches back to having two narrators’, each trying to solve a mystery in their own way, so this time you’re never sure who is ahead of who.

This took the novel in a different direction to the previous three. They all had mysteries involved, but they were ones that the reader could figure out just enough ahead of Cal to see where he made the wrong choices. Here Banks throws in more twists and turns, fuelled by the dual investigators, so that the central mystery is not clear until after Cal has chosen to reveal it to us, and even then there are a few twists.
In many ways, Innes gets to control his own fate, fare more than in previous books, and ends the series on the right note. Although I can’t expand on what I mean there without spoiling the whole thing.

The second narrator is a brilliant return for Donkin, the bully-cop from the first book. I may not get my wish, but I would gladly go to war to get a Donkin centric book, such is the way he comes alive here. He was a hell of a lot of fun.
There’s a feeling throughout the book of loss, of time catching up with people and burning them out. (SECOND CLUNKING CLICHÉ ON THE WAY) There’s inevitability to everybody’s stories, a sense of foreboding and fatalism that gives Banks’ latest book a Jim Thompson-esque quality that I really enjoyed.