Midnight and blue

Ian Rankin, winner of a host of awards and credited with inventing "Tartan Noir" (gritty mysteries set in the dark underworld of Edinburgh), returns with the twenty-fifth installment of the John Rebus mysteries. Former Detective Inspector Rebus has always been a man who's not above bending the law (and criminals' body parts) to solve crimes. Now he's serving a mandatory life sentence for the attempted murder of a career criminal. Rankin puts his aging hero at the center of an ingenious double locked-room mystery: the inmate in a locked cell right across from Rebus' is found stabbed to death. The governor of the prison enlists Rebus to solve the crime, with no police resources, corrupt prison guards, and drugged-up inmates who could turn on him at any time. Rankin gives the reader both an inside and an outside mystery, with Rebus' detective work mirrored by two of his former colleagues' work on the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl in Edinburgh. Fascinating details about prison life are included, such as the fact that the prison library will not stock true-crime books. There's maximum suspense as Rebus tries to solve a murder that might be followed by his own. A terrific addition to the Rebus series.

John Rebus gets pulled into a jailhouse murder case while serving time for killing his nemesis in Rankin's satisfying 25th mystery featuring the former Edinburgh detective (after Dead Souls). When gangster Jackie Simpson is found dead in his cell, with his cellmate beaten and left in a drugged stupor, the hunt for a killer kicks off. Rebus, a notorious lone wolf, nevertheless remains on good terms with some of his former colleagues on the Edinburgh police force, and he takes it on himself to aid the investigation from inside prison walls. Departmental politics, rarely straightforward, grow downright vicious as Rebus's involvement becomes a matter of debate. In a gripping subplot, a teenager's disappearance, reappearance, and role in a shocking sex scandal turn out to be linked to Simpson's web of crime. The narrative gradually sprawls across a noirish Edinburgh populated by hard-nosed cops and criminals, but Rankin pulls everything together with a brisk conclusion that hints Rebus might be back on the streets soon. Though this doesn't rank among Rankin's best, it's still a page-turner. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Oct.)

Just because he's in prison doesn't mean John Rebus can't keep solving crimes, even if he does need a little help from outside. Convicted of attempted murder after his attempt to scare Morris Gerald Cafferty--the unsavory client he'd taken on while working as an unofficial private eye inA Heart Full of Headstones (2022)--led to the man's fatal heart attack, Rebus has been doing time in HMP Edinburgh. Howard Tennent, the prison governor, wants to move him from isolation to the general population in Trinity, where Cafferty's successor, Darryl Christie, guarantees to protect him (yeah, right). Things work out less well for Jackie Simpson, who's been jailed for breaking into a nail bar owned by Everett Harrison, an enforcer for Liverpool refugee smuggler Shay Hanlon. Simpson's found stabbed to death, his cellmate Mark Jamieson knocked out by drugs that mysteriously got into his system. As Rebus asks cautious questions around his cellblock while trying not to annoy anyone (quite a stretch for him), his former colleague DI Siobhan Clarke hunts for missing schoolgirl Jasmine Andrews. The two cases couldn't be more remote from each other--until the murder of ex-footballer Zak Campbell forges a link between them without giving the slightest indication of who's guilty. That may be because almost everyone in Police Scotland looks just as guilty as the inmates at Trinity. The special appeal of the entry in this celebrated series is its vividly detailed portrait of the labyrinthine corridors of power in the prison, where everything is available for a price, and its unsettling connections to the corridors of power outside. It's inspiring to see that prison, along with the rotten system it represents, hasn't gotten Rankin's battered hero down. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.