Recent crime novels | 3 December 2011

The crop of recent crime fiction is generously sprinkled with well-known names; as far as its publishers are concerned, Christmas is not a time of year for risk-taking. The Impossible Dead (Orion, £18.99) is the second novel in Ian Rankin’s post-Rebus series featuring Inspector Malcolm Fox of ‘The Complaints’, the team that investigates allegations of misconduct among the police themselves. Fox and his colleagues arrive in Kirkcaldy, where a detective constable stands accused of corruption — by his own uncle, who is in the same force. But the case mushrooms into something far more momentous that leads to some dark corners of the Scottish nationalist movement in the 1980s.

Fox is a decent, rule-abiding and teetotal — more or less an anti-Rebus, in many ways, though he operates in the same world as his predecessor. He’s developing into an interesting character, not least because of his simple decency. That said, the novel is a relatively quiet affair, apart from some dramatic flourishes near the end.