A novel in Rankin’s John Rebus series. I’ve read more or less all of them, many of them twice. This is prime mid series stuff. Early in the series, Rebus is something of a cardboard cutout of a detective, a set of tics rather than a character, working through well-wrought but straightforward crime novel structures. Later, there’s almost too much character, both that of Rebus and that of the detailed network of ancillaries and associates, with the detecting and the plot at times incidental. But here, in the middle, we have the sweet spot: a fully realised protagonist, a substantial supporting cast, and a complicated but cogent plot.
It’s this last thing that makes the book remarkable. There are four cases, four plot lines, here. Rebus is involved in and investigating them all. This should be too much, for the detective and for the reader. But Rankin manages to keep it all spinning, the cases making contact with each other, enough given that the attentive reader can keep track without getting lost in a welter of names and leads and plot points. It really is an heck of an achievement to make a structure this complicated legible to the reader.
One particularly nice point about this is the combination of howdunnit and whodunnit, crudely speaking. One of the cases concerns a mostly retired serial killer: we’re given his identity early, and plenty of material from his perspective, and the question is whether and how Rebus will catch up with him. Another concerns a killer in the present, a copycat of the first: we don’t know who, and the question is whether Rebus will find out. One kind of plot is enough for most novels; combining the two is audacious and effective.
The book’s other chief virtue is its sense of place. Almost all the Rebus novels are primarily set in Edinburgh, and they’re justly famous for evoking the city, and for tracing its development over decades. This one also has Edinburgh at its centre, but ranges widely across Scotland: Glasgow, Aberdeen, Fife, off-shore rigs, the Shetlands. It feels like a miniature portrait of the country at a time of flux. There’s also a clever interweaving of fact and fiction. The historical serial killer was real, and other real cases are mentioned: the factual grounding of the fictive makes the sense of place more concrete.
It’s a really great book, this one, and I think enjoyable even without familiarity with the rest of series. Though you could do worse than read the whole lot of them.