Robin Llywelyn is a Private Detective, or at least that is what his card says. He has no memory, is handcuffed to the bed and in a hospice. When he is taken off his medication and told he has a short time to live, he is in shock.
Confused and wanting answers, he contacts his doctor, attorney and eventually someone he shouldn’t have! He finds out that he was charged with a crime, but the charges were dropped because of his medical condition. The problem is, he has no idea what the crime is and though several people allude to the fact that it involves money, no one tells him directly.
When he realizes there are people looking for him and he may have given them the way to track him, he takes off. He finds bodies, uses bartenders and even has a lady interested in him. Along the way, Robin meets a cast of interesting characters. It seems everyone knows more about him than he does and it irritates him to say the least.
He now has to get his memory back, evade the multiple players chasing him and discover exactly why everyone is after him, oh, and all of that before his cancer kills him. When he finally gets a decent lead on what he did, the race is on and he hopes to win!
An intriguing read that gives great insight into how the mind works. The mystery will keep you guessing throughout!

Reviewed by Ashley Wintters for Suspense Magazine ( )

Not often I buy a book straight after it’s been published, but I made an exception for this third outing of down-and-out private eye Robin Lywelyn. Loved the first two in the series – elaborate pub crawls with such geographical exactitude you could follow them on Multi Map.

In this instalment Llywelyn finds himself in a hospice suffering from cancer and memory loss, but in familiar fashion still manages to paddle up Sh*ts Creek against the tide, finding himself embroiled in a plot that at times can be puzzling, but one can take comfort from the fact that he doesn’t understand it either. Involving, among other things, drug taking, shotguns, dead bodies, bent coppers and financial irregularity in Merthyr Tydfil, the book never quite loses touch with the incongruity of its rural setting. Faced with a possible increase in the corpse count one character makes the pithy observation “This is Carmarthenshire not f***ing Paraguay” !

I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much as the other two – for a start, fifty one pages was a long time to wait for a belly laugh (though it was a good one), and there were times when the story appeared to stagnate with the characters saying the same thing over and over, before the final twist which was a bit like eating a marmite sandwich and unexpectedly finding it has been contaminated with strawberry jam. The writing, too, was not quite as razor sharp as in the previous books, but there was some impressively observed philosophy in there, and even at a slightly reduced standard Lewis still writes better than a lot of authors out there. Hope he writes lots more. ( )

http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=Bank_Of_The_Black_Sheep_(Rob... ( )