Among his other admirable qualities, Peter Robinson has a knack for adapting and even clarifying real-life crimes. The Paul Bernardo case was never so deeply explored as in Robinson’s 2001 novel Aftermath. In that book, DCI Alan Banks waded into a Yorkshire case with a set of facts much like those in the tortures and killings carried out by Ontario’s own Bernardo and Karla Homolka.

With Robinson’s new book, the crimes at the centre of the plot get us into the up-to-date evil of trafficking in illegal immigrants. As usual, Robinson slides into the book’s major business sideways, introducing the plot at the centre of the action by way of the mysterious murder of a veteran Yorkshire police inspector.

Banks’ investigation of the cop killing requires him to get a handle on Yorkshire-based commerce in migrant workers from Eastern Europe. The off-shore centre for these poor souls is the unlikely nation of Estonia, and that’s where Banks carries out most of his sleuthing.

The piecing together of the intricate case is mostly by-the-book stuff, a smart gathering of forensic evidence and countless interviews with a range of villains who aren’t as clever as they think they are. They’re definitely not as quick with the wits as Banks or his detective sidekick, the always appealing Annie Cabbot.

Robinson decorates the main narrative with plenty of personal interaction among the characters at Banks’s cop shop. Banks is feeling his fiftyish age, and turns petulant when an inspector from the Professional Standards unit is assigned to look over his shoulder throughout the case. Not even the intrusive inspector’s icy blond beauty softens the crabby Banks.

But some things never change for the DCI. At one perplexing point in Watching the Dark, he pours a glass of Malbec and puts on a CD by the English folksinger June Tabor. “He did his best thinking,” Robinson writes of Banks, “when he was listening to music and drinking wine.”

Robinson sounds many familiar notes in Watching The Dark, from Banks’ solo nightcaps with a drink in his hand and music playing on the stereo, to the DCI’s romantic yearnings for relationships akin to past loves like ex-wife Sandra, recent bygone paramour Sophia, and current colleague and now good friend DS Annie Cabbot. But the action plays out a little differently, thanks to a cop killed with a crossbow in the police rehab unit, mysterious photos that connect the dead man to a girl’s disappearance in Talinn, Estonia, and an icy blond policewoman whose job is investigating officers — and who, naturally, spars with Inspector Banks.

The fallacy of dinging an author, even mildly, for doing what he does best should be acknowledged here. After all, Robinson, who has earned his crime-writing stripes several times over, is still writing at a very high level, and one marvels at how he’s able to sustain that level of consistency with each subsequent book. That’s a bloody hard thing to do