Onyx reviews: A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 08/09/2020

Retired DI John Rebus is moving house. His COPD has made climbing the stairs to his apartment difficult, so he's found a new place—on the ground floor of the same building. He's not much one for change. He and his faithful companion Brillo are slowly growing accustomed to the new digs (and avoiding opening his moving boxes) when he gets a call from his semi-estranged daughter.

When Samantha Rebus was a girl, she was kidnapped by a man with a grudge against her father. The demands of Rebus's job had already taken its toll on his marriage, which ended in divorce, and Samantha grew up with her mother in London. She's now living on the outskirts of Naver, a small town in northern Scotland, and Rebus has been attempting to mend their fraught relationship in recent years. When her partner, Keith—father of her eight-year-old daughter, Carrie—vanishes, she turns to her father for help.

Everyone in Naver knows everyone else's business, including the fact that Samantha had an affair with the leader of a local commune. Still, Samantha is sure that isn't the reason why Jess hasn't returned home for two days. Rebus doesn't hesitate—he leaves his unpacking, deposits Brillo with his former protégé, Siobhan Clarke, and takes his decrepit car on the long drive north. He promises to be back in a day, but his excursion turns into a week-long misadventure when the disappearance turns into something more serious and Samantha is in the crosshairs of the local constabulary. Rebus has no official standing, but he can't help sticking his nose into the investigation. He's in a somewhat unfamiliar position relative to the police, but he has the advantage of knowing all their procedures and shortcuts.

Meanwhile Siobhan Clarke is working on the stabbing murder of a Saudi playboy, a James Bond aficionado whose father is under house arrest back home. The international angle turns this into a high-profile case, which brings Malcolm Fox from the Major Crime Division, into the task force. He and Clarke know each other from previous encounters, and they partner up to try to get to the bottom of a case that involves politicians, landed gentry and rich millennials. The investigation also brings them into contact with Rebus's old nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty. Siobhan knows how Cafferty operates, and she has to do her best to make sure the criminal mastermind doesn't get his hooks into Fox, who is in danger of becoming a servant to two masters.

Rebus learns that Keith was a history buff with a particular interest in a WWII internment and POW camp that he thinks could be turned into a tourist attraction, if the current owner could be convinced to part with the land. Among his papers, Rebus discovers information about the camp's past that might have a bearing on the current situation. Some of the camp's prisoners remained in the area after the war instead of returning to their homelands. Someone may be determined to keep the past buried.

While Rebus's and Siobhan's cases threaten to overlap at times, Rankin is too savvy to rely on that old trope. Scotland is a small country, and certain larger-than-life personalities have a presence in different regions. It is highly satisfying to watch Rebus ply his trade without benefit of a warrant card—and his COPD doesn't slow him down much—while at the same time navigating a difficult relationship with his daughter, who is resentful of the fact that he can't just be a supportive father, but also a cop on the job, even unofficially. The Edinburgh murder case proves to be complicated and, at the same time, quite simple, solved by diligent police work. Siobhan Clarke has learned much from Rebus but knows how to distance herself from some of his less savory tactics. Most of the time.

One of the things Rebus took with him to his new apartment—in addition to boxes of books and records—was a stack of cold case files. Future novels could involve him trying to get to the bottom of the cases he failed to close during his long tenure on the police force.

Amusing cameo: While helping Rebus move, Siobhan discovers that he is a Jack Reacher fan. Series author Lee Child makes an appearance at a local bookstore during the weeklong investigation, accompanied by another real-life author, Karin Slaughter. They remain off-screen, though.