Ian Rankin returns with another tale of murder for John Rebus in Even Dogs in the Wild
When Rebus goes to his doctor, he’s told he needs to give up the booze. When Rebus asked for a second opinion, the doctor said: “You should give up smoking too.”
Rebus admits halfway through the novel that he’s “knackered.”
He’s not young anymore but he still has the terrier-like instincts for a case that gets him dragged into the murder of a retired legal bigwig — Lord Minton, “a confirmed bachelor” who spent his career prosecuting Scotland’s most notorious criminals.
The Lord Advocate gets killed in his study, bludgeoned to death with a hammer.
The murderer has left a note in the dead man’s wallet: ‘I’m going to kill you for what you did.’
When the same calling card turns up in the house of Rebus’s old nemesis, the gangster Big Ger Cafferty, after he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt, Edinburgh’s police force — with Rebus acting in a consultative capacity — is left to unravel a case that links the Scottish Establishment with Edinburgh’s biggest mob bosses, Cafferty, the young, ambitious and well-tailored Darryl Christie, and the secrets of a 1980s’ borstal.
Into the mix is added Joe Stark, who looks a ringer for the snooker player Ray Reardon without the grin, Stark’s head-case son, Dennis, and their goons, a family firm who are behind half the crime in Glasgow.
They’re drawn to Edinburgh on the trail of a rogue drugs smuggler who’s “sitting on half a million in coke and eccies and the same in lovely hard cash” and a desire, the police speculate, to eek out fresh criminal territories.
The waters are further muddied by a three-year-old, Glasgow-run undercover operation on the Starks who set up shop in Edinburgh, a six-person unit that spend a lot of their time either running down their Edinburgh colleagues or drinking tea and eating custard slices.
A police mole has burrowed his way into the Starks’ inner sanctum but he may have gone native, reckons DI Malcolm Fox, who takes centre stage in the action because of a secondment to the surveillance op.
Fox has near-pariah status in the Edinburgh police force because of his past work in Professional Standards, a job that entailed snooping on his colleagues.
Fox has a troubled relationship with his dying father who always believed his son to be better suited to office rather than street work when it comes to policing.
Fox wants to prove him wrong and he has the spying instincts that serve him well in uncovering a possible double agent.
Rankin’s 20th Rebus novel, which is set over ten days, is an elaborate affair, which has a rather implausible conclusion to the police snitch subplot.
One of Rankin’s gifts, though, is that he moves things along at a steady clip thanks to his preference for dialogue over description. Testiness is the abiding emotion of its key characters; none of them lack a sharp, sarcastic tongue.
He does a good job too in capturing how wearing it must be to be a mob boss.
At one stage, on-the-run Cafferty realises he can’t remember ever feeling carefree, as he’s surrounded by possible attack and those he can’t risk trusting:
“He had clambered his way to the top, trampling those he needed to, gouging and scratching and kicking, making a slew of enemies but ensuring, too, that those enemies would lack the strength to topple him. Was that any sort of kingdom?”
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