The Impossible Dead

Ian Rankin (forgiving his first novel), is a thinking man's mystery writer. He writes not so much mystery as police procedural. There aren't explosions on every page and there's a lot of driving around and drinking of Irn-Bru (or something stronger) in his books. I liked the Inspector Rebus books enough to read most of them and I've read a couple of his one-offs, but he's got a new series going here about The Complaints--the police who investigate other police for wrong-doing and ethical violations. Needless to say, these rotating members are less than popular, if not outright despised by other officers. The first in the series, obviously titled The Complaints, was almost boring in its minutia, and reading it was made more difficult by Rankin's insistence on using despairingly similar names for half his characters. Still, I finished it because I generally like procedurals and I do think he's a good writer.

I'm happy to say that the second book about Malcolm Fox and his fellow "Complaints," has an actual mystery and a lot of forensic archeological digging through paper. The Impossible Dead zips right along. I'm less happy to say that I decided I don't really like the main character. Fox is too bland. Where Rebus was a drinker (disturbing enough at times), Fox is a teetotaler who begins his evenings with something called appletizer. His personal life is depressing to the point of being boring and so I can't get too caught up with his fate. He's at his best digging through papers or keeping his two partner/subordinates from bashing each other. (Rankin again makes life difficult for the reader by giving them the names Kaye and Naysmith--there's no excuse for names that begin with the same vowel sound and have similar spelling). Fox is at his worse when running through the woods to escape an angry man with a gun. I don't buy it. I can't picture him in such a situation and Rankin doesn't help by not painting a more physical picture of his protagonist. I pictured a guy in a suit with bad teeth and a pasty complexion from bad food, stumbling along while chases by a similarly incongruous man. Call me American, but if you're going to have action, make your characters either hopeless in a chase or disturbingly cool about it, not somewhere in-between.

Still, I liked the digging through the past (1980s) when the Scottish Nationalist Party was employing less than legal means to achieve their goal of separatism. How far we've come in our definition of terrorism, though there's no discounting homemade bombs, whatever year they were set. Nobody's a good guy in this; everyone is flawed and everyone has something to hide. I suppose that's to be expected in a novel built on the premise of police corruption. How high up it goes and how far back it's safe to dig, is what keeps this story moving along. Just don't get too excited about the run through the woods.