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.
No comments:
Post a Comment