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I'm going to skip all the references to the Reichenbach Falls and the difficulty of resurrecting retired series characters and cut straight to the chase - Rebus is back and I am very glad to see him. Readers of the series will recall that Rankin, who adopted what proved to be a short-sighted strategy of ageing his hero in real time, came up against the regulation that required him to retire Rebus at 60, in 2007. Happily he didn't actually kill him off, and now that the retirement age has been extended, Rebus has applied to be reinstated on the force. His application has not as yet been accepted however. In the meantime, he is serving as a civilian resource on a cold case unit looking over abandoned cases from the past. A woman interests Rebus in the fate of her daughter, missing for a number of years, by pointing out the similarities between her disappearance and that of several other young women, all of whom went missing near the A9. This was historically the main road between Edinburgh and northernmost Scotland, but now is in part superseded by more modern highways. (Is there a metaphor here? I dunno.) It does run through places whose names sound as if they were the titles of the playlist for a traditional pipe band. Rebus becomes convinced that there is a serial killer at work and manages to convince CID to open a full-scale investigation. It is an operation that will find him working with his old colleague Siobhan Clarke, in an association that may threaten Siobhan's career. Rebus may want to return to active service, but though his drinking seems to be slightly more restrained than in the past, his combative attitude toward his superiors remains intact as does his lack of faith in contemporary methods of policing. He knows the value of a word in someone's ear and the equal value of keeping his own ears open for what he can learn. If that means that he has the odd drink with known gangsters, he'll do that if he must. To Malcolm Fox, Rankin's newest series protagonist, that suggests that Rebus is dirty and Fox, still working for Complaints or whatever it's currently being called, is committed to exposing Rebus and bringing him to book. I began by saying that Rebus is back, but he isn't, quite. He has not only been sprung loose from his formal connection with Lothian and Borders CID, but in this book, he spends more time outside of Edinburgh than in it, travelling along the road favoured by the serial killer. And this relative rootlessness distances him from the reader to some degree. (Curiously, his antagonist, Malcolm Fox, who did a fair amount of wandering in THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD, stays pretty much in one place here.) And Rankin reminds us of Rebus's advancing age in quiet ways. He thinks, for example, that the hypnotic tick of his car's wipers is like waking up to the sound of a stylus still circling the run-out groove of a vinyl album. It's a comparison that reminds the reader both of Rebus's history of alcoholic sleeps and of his age. Few of those he's working with would ever have heard that sound (and many readers might not recognize it either). But Rebus still remains himself. This is not to say that this is quite up to the great books in the series. The plot is resolved almost perfunctorily, with neither the tension nor the drama we expect. Another weakness, which Rankin may be prepared to deal with in Rebus' next appearance, is what has happened to Malcolm Fox. He was quite an interesting and complicated character when first we met him in THE COMPLAINTS, less so in his subsequent outing (THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD). Now he seems reduced to a cliché - the reformed drunk who is single-minded in his pursuit of what he knows in his bones is a dirty cop - Rebus. Abstemiously lunching on a banana and a glass of water while Rebus knocks back the Irn Bru and a pastry, he makes his position clear. He speaks for the modern police force, on which Rebus has no place, and Fox will do everything he can to prevent Rebus from returning to duty. (No contest here in the readers' loyalties.) Rankin has certainly set up for an epic confrontation sooner or later, but I hope it is against a more worthy antagonist than this particular version of Fox. Readers who are unfamiliar with the earlier books in the series ought not to start here, since much of its force depends on what we know about the prior history of the recurrent characters. But anyone who is familiar with the series will want to read this one, and right away. If it is not quite top of the line Rebus, it's certainly close enough. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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