Saints of the Shadow Bible

JOHN REBUS is the kind of cop who isn't afraid to think, and what he's thinking in Ian Rankin's terrific new procedural, SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE (Little, Brown, $26), is that he and his ilk aren't long for this brave new world. Having decided that retirement wasn't such a hot idea after all, the Edinburgh homicide detective is back on the job, but feeling increasingly out of step with his younger, more tech-savvy and ethics-bound colleagues. "My town, my rules" was the mantra adopted by Rebus and those old cronies (the self-anointed "saints" of the title) who held themselves above the regulations governing the behavior of lesser cops. But that boast rings hollow when Internal Affairs opens an investigation into a 30-year-old case of dubious probity. Complications arise, as they always do in Rankin's painstakingly constructed plots, linking the old case with a suspicious auto accident involving the offspring of a high-profile politician and a crooked businessman. (The mothers don't count for much here, as women rarely do in this series.) In one surprisingly bold move, Rankin has shifted Malcolm Fox, Rebus's perennial nemesis and current Internal Affairs shadow, into a closer relationship - something dangerously akin to friendship - with his old enemy. "The whole system's changed, hasn't it?" Fox says, in one of their more intimate exchanges about the capricious nature of police work and those slippery definitions of right and wrong. Rebus doesn't really need the reminders. His apartment décor of cigarette butts, beer bottles, print newspapers and LPs of Miles Davis ("from the period before he got weird") might tag him as a candidate for the tar pits where dinosaurs from the 1980s go to die. But confronting the man he used to be has left him with a comforting insight - young dinosaurs are being born every day. MARTHA GRIMES HAS a dangerous sense of humor. She cracked it like a whip in "Foul Matter," her 2003 takedown of the publishing industry. The satire is even more barbed in this sequel, THE WAY OF ALL FISH (Scribner, $26.99), which brings back the best (that is to say, the worst) of those ruthless publishers, unprincipled agents, devious lawyers and difficult authors who make the book business so ripe for parody. The novel's imperiled heroine is Cindy Sella, a respected but naive novelist embroiled in a costly lawsuit with her unscrupulous former agent, L. Bass Hess, and his evil henchmen in the law firm of Snelling, Snelling, Borax and Snelling. Cindy sets the amusingly absurd plot in motion by leading the rescue of a tank of exotic fish in the Clownfish Cafe, thereby endearing herself to fellow diners Candy (who admires all creatures aquatic) and Karl (who feels the same way about books). These lovable contract killers, first met in "Foul Matter," plan to save Cindy from her dastardly ex-agent through an elaborate scheme of byzantine design, hilariously executed by a huge cast of Dickensian characters. The tone may be light - "How noir is this?" Karl complains of one gentrified setting. "Where's your fog? Your foghorns? Your miasma?" - but Grimes's notion of farce is positively lethal. THERE'S TOO MUCH sentimental gush and not enough guts and gore in THE DEVIL'S BREATH (Kensington, paper, $15), the latest entry in Tessa Harris's uneven but fascinating series featuring Dr. Thomas Silkstone, an American anatomist struggling to pursue his mystifying profession of forensic science in the imperfectly enlightened society of 18th-century England. Harris is at her vivid best describing in precise, fearsome detail the "Great Fogg," the clouds of noxious poison gas that swept across Europe in 1783, darkening the sky, destroying crops and snatching the breath of men, women and children. Dashing between his London laboratory and his ladylove's country estate, Thomas works feverishly to determine the cause of this airborne plague and find a cure. The ignorance and superstition of the age hamper his work, but so does the robotic behavior of the stock characters around him. As if to compensate, Harris offers revoltingly graphic glimpses of London, where erudite men think deep thoughts but have yet to discover the benefits of sanitation. THE DANISH AUTHOR Jussi Adler-Olsen revisits his favorite topics of captivity and torture in THE PURITY OF VENGEANCE (Dutton, $26.95), a sordid tale of "unwanted pregnancy, abortion, rape, unjust confinement to mental asylums and compulsory sterilization" inspired by actual events during a dark period of Danish history. Ah, but there's more, so much more in this frenzied thriller: homicide by poison, scalpel and hammer, multiple nail-gun murders, a sulfuric acid attack, displays of putrefying body parts and the splendid Grand Guignol spectacle of a dinner party (complete with place cards) for five (or is it six?) corpses. Carl Morck, the homicide cop charged with making sense of all this gaudy material, is a bit of a joker himself. More a bad-tempered grouch than a brooding hero in the classic Scandinavian mode, he presides over Department Q, an eccentric cold case unit staffed with personnel rejects and relegated to the basement of Copenhagen's police headquarters. It's a strange world down below and not to be taken too seriously; but still, there's never a dull moment in the cellar.

*Starred Review* Rankin took the gutsy step in Standing in Another Man's Grave (2013) of bringing back his much-loved maverick hero, John Rebus, and setting him opposite Malcolm Fox, internal-affairs cop, hero of The Complaints and The Impossible Dead (both 2011), and, seemingly, Rebus' polar opposite. That experiment was a resounding success, so, naturally, Rankin ups the ante still further. This time the formerly retired Rebus, now back on the force but at a lesser rank, and Fox, facing the dissolution of his IA unit and the prospect of becoming a real detective again, find themselves working together, taking advantage of a new Scottish law allowing the reprosecution of old crimes by digging into a 30-year-old murder. Ah, but there's a wrinkle. Rebus was a rookie at the time of the murder, the newbie in a squad of take-no-prisoners detectives who called themselves the Saints, and it looks like the new investigation may implicate the Saints, or at least some of them, in a cover-up or worse. Rebus investigating his buddies and, by extension, himself? Echoing the similar situation in which New Orleans detective Remy McSwain finds himself in Jim McBride's 1986 film The Big Easy, Rankin's narrative forces Rebus to come to terms with a shocking truth about himself: he's a cop first and a maverick second, a truth seeker before a rule breaker. That's a tough blow for the cantankerous Rebus to absorb, equaled only by the fact that he winds up respecting even, for God's sake, liking the hardworking Fox. Longtime fans of the series will savor every nuance in the subtle interplay between characters here, but Rankin doesn't forget the thriller plot, either, corkscrewing the narrative into a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Hats off to a writer who can keep a long-running series fresh by upsetting our expectations and rummaging ever deeper into the rag-and-bone shop of his characters' hearts.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist

John Rebus comes out of retirement in Edgar-winner Rankin's stellar 20th novel featuring the Edinburgh cop (after 2013's Standing in Another Man's Grave). Rebus, though, must accept a demotion-from detective inspector to detective sergeant-not that he cares about rank. It's the case that counts, which in this entry involves "conspiracies, connections and coincidences." Malcolm Fox, the officer in charge of the Complaints department (the Scottish version of Internal Affairs), leads an investigation into whether a fast and loose group of cops in the mid-1980s known as the Saints of the Shadow Bible might have tainted a murder trial back when Rebus was a young officer. Rankin deftly ties the old case into a fresh one that begins with a seemingly routine car accident involving the daughter of a powerful businessman that soon expands to involve the suspicious death of the public face of the Scottish nationalist movement. The immense and intricate canvas includes dozens of characters, plots within plots, and multiple themes, from Scottish independence to the insidiousness of corruption, public and private. Too much may be going on at times for some readers, but distinctive characters (including Edinburgh itself) make the book memorable. "The good guys are never all good and the bad ones never all bad," says Rebus, and that certainly applies to Rebus himself, willful, determined, and droll. 8-city author tour. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.