Standing In Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin

Rebus is back — after an absence of five years. Those unfamiliar with the 60-year-old curmudgeonly retired cop will not have to read far before they know him to be a man who remains a pessimist, yet hopes to make the world a better place, plays fair by his own lights, is barely in touch with his daughter, is faithful to his old Saab and loyal to his sparring colleague Det Insp Siobhan Clarke. His favourite tipple is whisky, his addiction to tobacco constant, like his love of rock ’n’ roll. As a civilian consultant in a cold case unit, he comes up against Martin Fox, head of ‘Ethics and Standards’, whiter than white we met him in Rankin's recent books Complaints and The Impossible Dead. Now we see him through Rebus’s eyes: a man who lives by the rules, drinks tap water and worries that Rebus will be a bad influence on Siobhan.

In Fox’s world there is no room ‘for even one maverick’. We might consider these two cops as good and bad, a leitmotif of Scottish literature epitomised by Jekyll and Hyde. A woman searching for her daughter, missing for 10 years, begs Rebus for help. He thinks there could be a connection with the disappearances near the A9 of five other young women who left no trace other than a photograph of a wild landscape sent at the time of their disappearances.

On a quest to find the truth, sometimes with Siobhan, sometimes alone with his Saab, he takes in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Inverness as far as the Black Isle peninsula, chasing clues and blind alleys with the sound tracks of Jackie Leven, John Martyn and Bert Jansch for company.

Rankin gives us the city of Edinburgh in real time; when Rebus is flummoxed by traffic congestion, caused by work on new tramlines, he finds his secret routes barred. His crime novels are much more than a simple whodunnit, with this latest Rebus book being a study of loss, memory and mortality.