A Song for the Dark Times

Starred review from August 17, 2020
Edgar winner Rankin’s excellent 23rd outing for John Rebus (after 2019’s In a House of Lies) takes the retired police inspector from Edinburgh to a remote part of northern Scotland, where his daughter Samantha’s partner, Keith Grant, the father of his school-age granddaughter, has vanished. In his search for Keith, Rebus visits a local commune and—of particular interest to Keith—the ruins of a camp built during WWII that held captured German soldiers. An entitled landowner he runs across complicates his quest. Back in Edinburgh, former colleague Siobhan Clarke investigates the murder of Salman bin Mahmoud, a wealthy 23-year-old Saudi. The high-profile case draws in such familiar characters as criminal Morris Gerald Cafferty and Malcolm Fox, the smarmy, ambitious detective introduced in 2009’s The Complaints. As the two plots converge, the various credible, complex backstories coalesce into a highly satisfying and unified whole. This fresh entry boasts the kind of storytelling that made Rankin famous. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary.

May 1, 2020

The first mystery Banville has written under his own name, rather than as Benjamin Black, Snow stars a crusty Protestant detective investigating a murder in County Wexford, buried in endless Snow. In Carlyle's debut, The Girl in the Mirror, jealous Iris takes over the identity--and the handsome husband--of golden-girl twin sister Summer, who mysteriously disappears from a yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean (100,000-copy first printing). In House of Correction, French's new stand-alone, back-in-town Tabitha is arrested for murder when a dead body is found in her shed, and given her pill-popping history of depression and faded recollections of the day, she starts wondering if she really is guilty (50,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Jewell's Invisible Girl, virginal 30-year-old geography teacher Owen Pick is suspended from his job for sexual misconduct he denies, ends up on a shady online involuntary celibate forum, and eventually is a suspect in a teenager's disappearance (250,000-copy first printing). Molloy follows up her New York Times best-selling The Perfect Mother with Goodnight Beautiful, about newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter, who have moved to his quiet upstate New York hometown as he pursues his career as a therapist, though, dangerously, his sessions are heard by neighbors through a ceiling vent (100,000-copy first printing). A Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner and finalist for multitudinous awards, Neville collects short crime, horror, and speculative fiction (some new to print) in The Traveller and Other Stories, a cogent example of Northern Irish noir. With Death and the Maiden, Norman wraps up mother Ariana Franklin's 1100s England-set series about Adelia Aguilar, Mistress of the Art of Death, with an original story about Adelia's daughter, Allie, investigating when several girls go missing from a village she is visiting (40,000-copy first printing). The protean Oates offers four masterly, never-before-published novellas, exemplified by the titular story in Cardiff by the Sea, whose protagonist rediscovers past tragedy when she inherits a house in Maine from someone she doesn't know. In Patterson/Serafin's Three Women Disappear, a mob accountant who is the nephew of the don of central Florida is fatally stabbed in his own kitchen, and which of three women--his wife, his maid, or his personal chef--might be responsible (500,000-copy first printing)? Rankin's A Song for Dark Times witnesses the returns of Inspector Rebus (50,000-copy first printing). In The Devil and the Dark Water, Turton's follow-up to the top LibraryReads pick, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, famed detective Samuel Pipps is sailing back to Amsterdam in chains when terrifying events assault the crew, Pipps's sidekick vanishes, and Pipps himself is asked to puzzle out what's happening.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2020
Like Louise Penny, Rankin consistently finds clever ways of involving his retired detective in new investigations. This time it's a late-night call from John Rebus' daughter, Samantha, that gets the former Edinburgh inspector's juices flowing. Samantha's husband has been missing for two days from their home in the north of Scotland, prompting Rebus to clamber into his aging auto and embark on the long drive up the coast to the coastal village of Tongue. What he finds there is a web of secrets and long-simmering resentments, involving both the residents of Tongue and Rebus' difficult relationship with his daughter. Samantha's husband, Keith, it turns out, had been researching the history of a WWII internment camp for German prisoners located near the village, in particular the murder of a prisoner from the camp. When Keith's body is eventually discovered, Samantha becomes the chief suspect, though Rebus works to connect this new murder to the decades-old crime. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Rebus' former partner, Siobhan Clarke, and fellow investigator Malcolm Fox are working a murder case of their own, one that may connect to the events in Tongue. Rankin hits on all cylinders here: he makes the most of the fascinating internment-camp story; he injects new life into the familiar mystery trope of an outside investigator roiling the surface calm of an insular community; and he continues to develop the rich interplay between Rebus and Clarke.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: As Tartan Noir grows in popularity, Rankin continues to lead the charge. His high-profile presence on social media will be particularly important in the pandemic era.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)