THE COMPLAINTS
Ian Rankin, Orion $37.99

Reviewed by The Bookman on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon show this morning with Kathryn Ryan.

Two years ago in Exit Music Ian Rankin retired his much-admired sleuth DI John Rebus after 17 novels, and many of his legion of fans around the world, including me couldn’t believe that Rebus had really gone.
Now Rankin has revealed a new detective, Inspector Malcolm Fox of the Lothian police complaints and conduct department. This unit, known as The Complaints is widely despised by the average cop being regarded as “the cold fish, the oddities, the cops who could never make it as bona fide detectives”.

So how do you replace a popular detective like the unorthodox Rebus? It seems to me that only an extremely confident author would retire a character they had taken 20 years to develop. And remember too that the books are all best-sellers, still all in print, they have been translated into 22 languages, and Rankin has won every crime fiction writers prize on both sides of the Atlantic.

At first it looks as if Rankin has decided to make this new character as dull and ordinary as possible. Fox is 40-something, doesn’t drink, lives alone in a bungalow decorated in “bachelor beige” and spends his evenings watching TV, mainly Top Gear repeats. Where Rebus gained huge street cred from his knowledge of and fondness for classic rock, Fox listens to a radio station that only plays birdsong.
But in fact Fox proves to be an interesting character, bookish and impressively streetwise, dry for five years after verging on alcoholism, and haunted by guilt about the violence in his brief and long-since failed marriage.

The story opens with Fox having just completed a case against a crooked cop and he is asked to look into a much younger detective from the same force, Jamie Breck, whose name and credit-card details have surfaced in a child-pornography inquiry in Australia.

At the same time as this is happening Fox is worried about his troubled sister Jude and her violent lover, Vince. He keeps his distance from them as much as possible, concentrating family-wise on his widower father, who lives in an expensive retirement home, which Fox pays for. He resents the cost of his father's rest home, and his sister’s lack of contribution, while never thinking of stopping his support. He also reassures his father on his regular visits that the question of the cost of the homeis not a problem and he can afford to make the payments.

The cop that Fox is investigating, Jamie Breck is also an interesting character, (my guess is we will see mre of him), much younger than Fox, but with the same sort of ability and cynicism; he is clearly destined for rapid promotion. Fox wonders if Breck’s relationship with a woman officer may be just a cover for his pedophile activities, he certainly spends hours on his computer.
While on the lookout for clues to a possible secret life, Fox duly befriends Breck but the killing of Vince, his sister’s lover, changes their relationship, because Breck is on the murder inquiry team and Fox is unable to keep from poking around the case because of his family involvement.

Gradually the pair become collaborators, even though Fox’s suspicions about Breck remain. Both are soon disciplined for rule-breaking, which serves to push them together; and after a property developer with financial worries vanishes (apparently having fallen off his boat) they start operating, against all the rules as a team.So Fox finds himself conducting an inquiry while suspended — a situation Rebus often found himself in.

It’s quite a complex story but Rankin pulls these various strands together with all his usual skill. He is, of course, a master when it comes to plots.
So in summary while Ian Rankin has given us a new detective in The Complaints one thing remains constant, he is still one of the very best writers in the crime fiction world.
And I am sure we are going to read a lot more about Inspector Malcolm Fox.

About the author:
Ian Rankin is one of the literary world's most recognised and well-loved authors. With an unerring eye for the shadowy secrets beneath the surface of modern life, his gripping crime novels have not only got under the skin of a city, but of a nation.

Hailed as both one of the top crime writers of a generation and a master chronicler of the dark side of our society, Ian Rankin is a writer of rare honesty, perception and skill.
His first Rebus novel was published in 1987 and the Rebus books are now translated into twenty-two languages and are bestsellers on several continents. Ian is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards and America’s celebrated Edgar Award. He has also received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.

Photo credit - The Press