The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin: A review

 

In this second entry in his Malcolm Fox series, Ian Rankin sends Fox and his Complaints team out of Edinburgh. They must go to the town of Kirkcaldy to investigate the possibility that a group of police officers has conspired to cover up the bad behavior of one of their fellow officers, Detective Paul Carter. Carter has been found guilty of sexual misconduct with women whom he had arrested. His own uncle, who is a former police officer, is the one who brought the charges against him to light. The Complaints team arrives in Kirkcaldy to find no cooperation from their fellow police officers and, in fact, obstruction of their investigation on every hand.

Malcolm Fox intuits very early on in the investigation that all is not quite as it seems. There may be more here than meets the eye, and, since this is an Ian Rankin plot, of course there is.

Fox goes to talk with the uncle. Soon after their conversation the uncle is found dead, at first thought to be a suicide, but things don't add up. What was first put down as a suicide soon is found to be murder. Not only that but the prime suspect in the murder is the nephew, the disgraced Paul Carter.

Then, Paul Carter turns up dead. Curiouser and curiouser.

Meantime, Fox is digging into the background of the uncle's death and finds a link to the days of chaos and violent demonstrations in favor of Scottish independence which took place in the 1980s. This leads him to the death - again, a supposed suicide - of one of the firebrand leaders in the independence movement.

Throughout his investigation, Fox is also dealing with personal trauma as his elderly father's health fails and his only sister's resentment of him (Malcolm) grows.

Rankin has created believable and empathetic characters in this series, and it will be interesting to see how they grow as the series progresses. In this particular book, I especially enjoyed all the "inside baseball" references. Things such as allusions to Midsomer Murders (which I love!), John Le Carre, and a crime scene technician's reference to "woolly suits." When Fox looks askance, she smiles and says there used to be a DI who used that term to refer to the uniformed cops. Yes, we remember that DI well and lament his retirement, but Malcolm Fox is a worthy successor.