It is a very difficult thing to follow up an award winning novel with a worthy sequel. Very difficult. Usually, the writer psychologically thinks that now he can rest on his laurels a bit, and he does not put as much effort into the sequel as he might have done were he still striving to write a novel that would really put him on the map. If we were worrying about Ian Rankin falling into some kind of sophomore slump, we can forget about it— entirely. This novel crackles with energy, pace, and interesting characters, and there is plenty of pathos. The pathos comes from the fact that Sammy, John Rebus’ daughter is nearly killed in a hit and run accident in downtown Edinburgh, and Rebus is pretty sure it must be someone getting back at him for his police work, for putting someone away in jail. But who? There are more heavy duty criminals in this novel than there are toys and prizes in a Crackerjack Box.
To begin with there is Big Ger Cafferty, once more with feeling. Yes, he’s still in jail, but yes, his troops are still out there minding his Empire until he gets out. Meanwhile, the new kid in town Tommy Telford is trying to muscle in and take over all of Cafferty’s business… while the cats away… Then there is the Chechen Mafia man who works out of Newcastle who wants a piece of the Edinburgh action. And to top it all off, there is also a probable Nazi war criminal, Joseph Lintz, who may have caused one of the great atrocities of all in France during WWII, hanging the civic leaders from trees, and then locking most of the rest of the innocent citizens in a church and barns and setting fire to both.
The Jewish Nazi hunters have Joseph high on their list of people they still want to bring to trial, even in the 1990s, but thus far they had been unable to nail him. And the question that keeps creeping into the equation is— ‘does the passage of time matter when it comes to an issue of justice, and is there a difference between justice and revenge.
It is John Rebus himself who says there is— justice, he says is a fine thing, and hardly anyone has a greater passion for justice in the whole police force than Rebus, revenge is an emotion, revenge is taking the law into one’s own hands. But isn’t that exactly what Rebus does when he bends the rules, again and again? Rankin has Rebus at his most raw and vulnerable here, as the brief excerpt below will show.
“The whole enterprise had shown him a simple truth: no vacuum. Where you have society, you have criminals. No belly without an underbelly. Rebus knew his own criteria came cheaply: his flat, books, music and clapped-out car. And he realized he reduced his life to a mere shell in recognition that he had completely failed at the important things: love, relationships, family life. He had been accused of being in thrall to his career, but that had never been the case. His work sustained him only because it was an easy option. He dealt every day with strangers, with people who didn’t mean anything to him in the wider scheme. He could enter their lives and leave again just as easily. He got to live other people’s lives, or at least portions of them, experiencing things at one remove, which wasn’t nearly as challenging as the real thing. Sammy had brought home to him these essential truths: that he was not only a failed father but a failed human being; that police work kept him sane, yet was a substitute for the life he could have had, the kind of life everyone else seemed to lead. And if he became obsessed with his case-work, well, that was no different from being obsessed with train numbers or cigarette cards or rock albums. Obsession came easy– especially to men– because it was a cheap way of achieving control, albeit control over something practically worthless.” p. 372
Self-understanding is a good thing, as Socrates once said in different words. John Rebus, through the help of his friend Jack Morton, has gotten his drinking under control. He has abstained for months…. but his obsession with solving cases, not so much. I loved this novel, and quite literally could not put it down, especially when I got to the last breakneck 150 pages. Would Sammy recover consciousness in the hospital? Would Rebus track down the man who put her there? Would the crime schemes of Tommy Telford be foiled by Rebus and others? Would Rebus finally find true romance? Would he stop associating every experience in his life with some familiar rock song’s title or lyrics? Inquiring minds want to know. This novel is just the right length (shorter than Black and Blue) to fully develop the plot, to keep you guessing, and to weave together the various story lines into a satisfactory conclusion.
My recommendation after reading the ninth novel in this series is— start here if you want to find out whether Rankin ranks high in your book. I doubt you will be disappointed.
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