Abattoir Blues
Banks and his crew are always reliable. This one will leave a couple of pretty vivid and horrible images, and I've learned maybe a bit more than I wanted to about slaughterhouse implements and procedures. The thing is, the reader's learning these things alongside Banks' investigators, who are also repulsed (but have to deal with it, just as we do). There's a lot of emphasis on the women investigators - Winsome Jackson and Annie Cabot - while Banks has the big picture and goes off to London to have a faceoff with the Big Man. Money, as always, is the root of most of the evil, but there is also a particular nasty psychotic at work, and Winsome ends up in his clutches for the dramatic climax of the story - in an abattoir, needless to say.
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