Rebus is back, in a novel long, meaty and persuasive enough to make up for the years of absence. Actually, he is only part-way back — on a civilian attachment to the Edinburgh & Lothian Police, and working on cold cases. However, the retiring age has been raised, and he has applied for re-instatement. He may not succeed; the head of this small department is unlikely to recommend him, and Inspector Fox, the officer in charge of the complaints department, who has been the lead character in Rankin’s last two novels, regards him with suspicion, dislike and contempt.
To his mind, Rebus is a type of policeman who should be extinct. He doesn’t play by the book. He has suspiciously close relationships — even perhaps friendships — with criminals, notably the gangster Big Ger Cafferty, with whom, diminished and in at least semi-retirement, Rebus has a regular pub session. In short, in Fox’s eyes, Rebus is a menace and a liability. Moreover, he stinks of tobacco and alcohol; Fox himself can’t take the stuff, and is now a teetotaller.
However, you can’t keep Rebus down. A girl disappears on the A9 road between Perth and Inverness. There have been other such disappearances over a number of years. They are in the cold case files, and the mother of one of the missing girls makes contact with Rebus. He persuades his former assistant, DI Siobhan Clarke, that the resemblances between the different cases are sufficiently strong to suggest that there is a serial killer at work; for instance, photographs of a hillside have been sent from some of the girls’ mobile phones.
Thanks to Siobhan Rebus is taken temporarily back on the strength, as, I suppose, a civilian adviser — though, not surprisingly he is soon acting as if he was still a policeman — and still cutting corners, still disregarding the rules, still associating with criminals, among them the lover of the last dead girl’s mother, and the girl’s chilly brother, representative of the new generation of hi-tech gangster-businessmen.
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