Over the years, Rankin has put his iconic Edinburgh police detective John Rebus through the wringer. In the latest, MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Rebus is 60-something and in jail for the murder of his longstanding frenemy, Morris Gerald Cafferty, one-time lord of the city’s criminal underworld.
Rebus maintains that he only meant to frighten Cafferty when the man died of a heart attack. His appeal is pending.
Although a cop’s chances of surviving the general prison population are low, Rebus is his usual salty self. He enjoys the fragile protection of Darryl Christie who took over Cafferty’s crime operations but is doing a stretch in jail himself. Christie runs his criminal enterprise from his jail cell despite pressure from an outsider who is making a play for Christie’s territory.
With tensions already running high in the prison, an inmate is stabbed to death on Rebus’s cell block. Rebus’s former police colleagues are called in to investigate.
Did a guard do it? Or another inmate? No murder weapon, no blood anywhere.
At the same time, his long-time partner Siobhan Clarke is looking for a missing girl, eventually tracing her to a soft porn site run by a famous athlete with ties to the dead inmate.
Everything ultimately connects in Ian Rankin’s usual brilliant way.
Take your time reading because there are many characters in this book. Two separate police investigations, a score of prison inmates, prison guards, criminals on the outside running amok, the soft porn website bunch, etc.
All of the secondary characters from previous books are back, including Malcolm Fox, the driven detective who started out in Internal Affairs (THE COMPLAINTS) and is never as good at his job as he wants to be.
The most intriguing character in MIDNIGHT AND BLUE might be Darryl Christie. We first met him as an ambitious teen 7 books ago. He’s older and more cunning now. Jail is hardly a setback.
After this, I re-read STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE, the first book in which Christie appears. He’s a great foil to Rebus, younger and more calculating. He swims in and out of Cafferty’s dangerous wake as he takes control of Edinburgh’s underworld, making for a series-within-a-series.
Each Rebus-Christie book is better than the last. Here they are in order:
STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE
SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE
EVEN DOGS IN THE WILD
RATHER BE THE DEVIL
IN A HOUSE OF LIES
A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES
A HEART FULL OF HEADSTONES
MIDNIGHT AND BLUE
