A warm welcome back for Rebus as he opens cold files

Ian Rankin

Orion Books, €14.99;

e-book, €11.99

Review: Richard Fitzpatrick

Five years on from retirement, “after taking the gold watch,” John Rebus, one of British crime fiction’s favourite detectives, is back.

Standing in Another Man’s Grave is Ian Rankin’s 19th Rebus novel. His curmudgeonly, Edinburgh sleuth has taken up a desk at the Serious Crime Review Unit, “working with the long dead”, not that he’s to be found in the office much.

Events spiral when he meets with Nina Hazlitt, the mother of a girl who disappeared on the night of the millennium New Year’s Eve, and the kind of woman to whom Rebus is fatally attracted — “confused, needy, damaged”.

Her daughter’s case seems to be connected to the disappearance of other girls, most recently that of Annette McKie, a 15-year-old whose mother is dating Frank Hammell, one of Edinburgh’s biggest gangsters.

The connection between the cases is the A9 motorway, which cuts through the north of Scotland on the way to Inverness.

The brooding Scottish Highlands give the book a feel of stillness and isolation.

“The wilderness remained wilderness precisely because nobody bothered to stop,” says the narrator as Rebus lugs his battered SAAB through its desolate hills.

The isolation befits Rebus. His great charm is his irascibility. He’s a lone wolf. Seconded back to his old police station, his default mode is to unsettle all around him with his renegade practices, and, “proud of the fact”, challenges DI Siobhan Clarke, his old protégé.

Alarming for his superiors, who are ridiculed to the point of farce — Rebus’s direct superior, James Page, wears galoshes at rural crime scenes — is his penchant for cavorting with the city’s mobsters, including his old nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty.

“I know a bad cop when I see one,” says Malcolm Fox, a new hero from Rankin’s recent novels, who works in internal affairs. “Rebus has spent so many years crossing the line, he’s managed to rub it out altogether. As far as he’s concerned, his way’s the right way, no matter how wrong the rest of us might know it to be ... [he] should be extinct. Somehow, the Ice Age came and went and left him still swimming around while the rest of us evolved.”

Rebus battles gamely against technology in the police force. When someone suggests bringing in a profiler, he scoffs, saying they might as well bring in a Ouija board. He doesn’t do email, instead he gives hand-written notes to a junior about their case’s victims, which include an observation about hairdresser Zoe Beddows that she “liked the men”.

While his colleagues make hay with efits (computer-based facial composites of what the case’s victims will likely look like years after their disappearances), and Twitter for mass public appeals, Rebus prefers using old shoe-leather techniques, working leads and chasing up witnesses and family members.

“You’re vinyl, we’re digital?” Clarke says.

“Contacts used to be the way you got things done,” he says. “The only network that mattered was the one out there on the street.”