It all makes for a deliciously complex
novel. Rankin is a master of his craft and doesn’t rely on shock and horror to
build tension. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, Courtesy of The Witness)
A Heart Full of Headstones, the latest in Ian Rankin’s long running series of crime novels featuring John Rebus, now officially retired from Police Scotland, opens with Rebus in the dock in court. We may not know what he’s charged with, but it’s no spoiler to say he’s in trouble. Of course, trouble and Rebus are never far apart. He may now be physically frailer and no longer at the official forefront of the fight against crime, but he’s not sitting quietly at home with his dog and his music.
Then we go back to start the sequence of events that have brought our hero (or anti-hero, depending on your standpoint) to the dock. Rebus has been asked by an old nemesis and gang boss to try to track down a man, long believed to be dead, because he claims he wants to apologise to him for past wrongs. And Rebus’s investigations seem to be running parallel to those of Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke, who is, of course, the old friend and colleague of Rebus.
Clarke is investigating the disappearance of a wife-beating cop who is threatening to expose secrets from Edinburgh’s most corrupt police station in the hope that the domestic violence allegations against him might get lost. And slowly the two cases begin to intertwine, often through seemingly peripheral characters.
Of course, as anyone who has followed Rankin’s novels will know, Rebus has a past which is anything but squeaky clean – and in these more politically-correct times, heavy-handed tactics which were once brushed under the carpet are now officially frowned upon. And there are those, in the police force and out of it, who would love to see Rebus finally brought to book. Professional jealousy is a part of it – he has a remarkable record of solving cases that lesser mortals were baffled by. As always, the reader has huge sympathy for Clarke. To be a loyal friend of Rebus is going to land you in a whole lot of bother.
It all makes for a deliciously complex novel. Rankin is a master of his craft and doesn’t rely on shock and horror to build tension. It’s not so much a whodunit as a slow discovery of what it is that Rebus has done that will take him into the dock. We get there in the end, and Rankin still manages to surprise as past and present converge. - Margaret von Klemperer
A Heart Full of Headstones is published by Orion: ISBN 978 1 3987 0935 5
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