Exit Music – Ian Rankin

There is a week and a half to go before DI Rebus takes his pension and bows out of the Lothian and Borders Police. His session with DS Siobahn Clarke handing over unfinished business is interrupted by a call to Raeburn Wynd and a dead body.

It is an exiled dissident Russian poet in the city to launch a new collection. Is the murder political, or just another mugging gone too far? Once Rebus gets involved more possibilities emerge as he sees (or imagines) connections to the Edinburgh overworld and underworld he knows so well. There are Russian investors in town, high-rolling bankers looking for profit, and politicians in the Scottish Parliament happy to facilitate where it suits their cause. With money and sleaze around, who better to insinuate himself into the mix than big Ger Cafferty, Rebus’s criminal nemesis.

Rebus’s (soon to be Clarke’s?) team is augmented by an ambitious but green PC eager to get a taste of life in CID. Problem is that he is from a criminal family – Rebus put away his granddad, and his brother is a drug dealing acolyte of Cafferty. Watch your back, John.

Rebus and Clarke build theories on the inter-connections. Clarke investigates conventionally, while Rebus, as ever, just pokes important people with a stick until something incriminating pops out.

Ian Rankin is comfortable in this skin. The prose rolls off the page with characteristic mixture of fluency and grit peppered with trademark references to Edinburgh geography, history, and culture both high and low.

As a finale, it is a worthy exit; case closed though some personal issues remain unresolved at retirement. We know now that Rebus returns for more, but for me this seventeenth, the planned end, will suffice, and ticks one off the book-et list.

The Satsuma Complex – Bob Mortimer

 Gary, 30, a legal assistant, living in a one-bed London flat, is a bit of a loner, though by circumstances rather than by choice. For months, his neighbour was simply ‘dog woman’ – not that she resembles one, but because she has a pooch. But recently she has become Grace, the dog Lassoo, and Gary happily runs errands for her - getting pies, toileting Lassoo – and pops in for a chat.

His only other confidante is a squirrel on the estate with which he has imaginary conversations when he has something on his mind.

Gary’s mundane life changes one evening when a work contact, Brendon of ‘Cityside Investigations’ invites him out for a pint at his local. Before they can finish one drink, Brendon takes a phone call and says he has to rush off on business. Also in the bar, sat alone reading a book, is an attractive brunette. She and Gary exchange pleasantries at the bar, then he joins her at her table. They get on well, have a few more drinks, then after a trip to the bar Gary returns to find her gone, though her book remains. It is called, The Satsuma Complex.

The story spirals out with disappearances, reappearances, deaths, policemen, and gangsters. Gary and Grace stumble through clues and crises trying to make sense of events. Gary is a low key hero, torn between his attraction for the brunette and his natural desire not to get involved in anything unpleasant or dangerous.

It is an easy read. Bob Mortimer’s familiar voice comes through strongly in Gary, but also permeates the narrative and to some extent the other characters, who all seem to share his distinctive conversational style. But the plot works, the characters are engaging, and interest is maintained to the end.

Colditz – Ben Macintyre

Colditz Castle was used, as most people know, by Hitler’s Germany to house Allied prisoners of war in the Second World War. And not just any prisoners, those who were serial escapers or were considered to be prize specimens due to their social connections, were gathered here, all the bad eggs in one basket.

This account, published 2022, takes a holistic look at the place and all those in it – prisoners, guards, and even the residents of the adjacent town. It also takes the opportunity afforded by a distance of seventy years to take a refreshingly independent view free from the shadow cast by the conflict, and for that matter the 1970s television series.

Though other ranks and nationalities get a mention, inevitably it is the British officers who feature most. After all, these are the people who kept diaries, wrote letters home, and penned memoirs afterwards. Their escape attempts, opportunistic or meticulously planned, done from a sense of duty or from personal desperation, are faithfully related along with the German countermeasures led by the anglophile Reinhold Eggers who moved up the ranks to become head of security at the camp. That the camp was under the auspices of the German Army rather than the SS or Gestapo, made such a game of cat and mouse possible.

Macintyre’s style is very readable, and he skilfully uses the chronological structure to show the changing mood in the camp from the bad boy club and jolly japes in 1941 fuelled by red cross parcels, through growing futility and boredom, to the underfed tension and desperation in 1945 as the German army retreated in the face of the Allied advance. Both prisoners and guards feared for their fate as the crazed Nazis in control the uncontrollable made life and death decisions on a whim.

All in all a well-balanced account of one of the oddities of World War Two.