A Song for the Dark Times
by Ian Rankin
This is the twenty-third novel in the long-running series featuring Edinburgh police detective John Rebus. A couple of books back, Rebus retired from the police force, but returned as a civilian to investigate cold cases. In this book he is retired again, though it seems he still can’t keep his nose out of police business.
As the book opens, Rebus is moving to a ground-floor flat: he’s 70 years old, has COPD and can no longer manage the four flights to his previous flat. Then he gets a call from his daughter Samantha, who lives in a small town in northern Scotland: her partner Keith has been missing for two days and she wants Rebus’s help to find him.
Meanwhile Siobhan Clarke, formerly John’s protege in the police force and now a Detective Inspector herself, is investigating the murder of a rich young Saudi Arabian student who was stabbed to death late one night in an isolated parking lot. There’s political pressure for a quick resolution, and a rival of Clarke’s from Major Crime Division—DI Malcolm Fox—has been seconded to join the investigation.
Samantha’s missing partner is found dead at the site of a former prisoner of war camp near their town; he’s been obsessed with its history and trying to get a historic designation for it .
The two investigations progress in parallel over the course of a week. As the complex plot unfolds we encounter prominent land developers, a former member of the Scottish Parliament, wealthy Scottish aristocrats, Edinburgh crime figures,and former World War II prisoners of war. Blackmail and career ambitions threaten to complicate the investigations. Possible motivations swirl around: money? Ambition? Jealousy?
Ultimately both cases are solved, but along the way we’re taken on a fast and bumpy ride. This one is hard to put down.
Ian Rankin was doing the final editing on this novel during the 2020 Covid pandemic. He says, “ An hour of daily outdoor exercise was permitted during lockdown, and the weather remained blessedly fine, so I would walk through Edinburgh’s emptied streets…. imagine August in Edinburgh with almost nobody on the streets.” Downtown Edinburgh is normally filled with tourists at any time, and especially in August when the famous Fringe Festival is on.
Born in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, then “spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature.” 1986 was a breakout year for him: that was the year he got married and his first novel was published. But it wasn’t until a year later, in 1987, that his first Rebus novel—Knots and Crosses—appeared. That was the beginning of the long-running series, now at number 23, as well as another two novels that take place in the Rebus world but feature a different lead cop, Malcolm Fox.
The Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents. Rankin has also written standalone novels, short stories and plays, along with a non-fiction book, Rebus’s Scotland. He’s won numerous prestigious writing awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger award as well as awards in Denmark, France, the US and Germany. Rankin’s books are estimated to account for 10% of all crime novels sold in the UK.
He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Miranda and two grown sons.
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