In one person (2012) by John Irving

John Irving’s new novel, In One Person, opens in First River, Vt., the small logging community where narrator Billy Abbott is being raised by his wounded, priggish mother, who has been abandoned by his (supposedly) caddish father. Growing up in the shadow of this betrayal, Billy worries he has inherited some unsavoury genetic trait from his father.

Specifically, he worries about his propensity to form crushes “on the wrong people.” The riddle of how crushes are formed and the constellation of unanswerable questions it raises – do we shape our desires or are we shaped by them, and are we in any way capable of judging them – is at the core of this searching, deeply affecting novel.

One of the people Billy develops a crush on is the handsome Richard Abbott, a newly arrived English teacher at the local private school. After Billy confides in him, Richard tries to be reassuring. “There are no wrong people to have crushes on,” he asserts. “You cannot will yourself to have, or not to have, a crush on someone.”

Thinking that literature will lend credence to this opinion, Richard takes Billy to the public library, where they encounter public librarian Miss Frost. She is broad-shouldered and powerful, with mannish hands and delicate, girlish breasts, and Billy immediately develops a crush on her.

When, soon after, he discovers Miss Frost is a transsexual – a former wrestling champion who used to be known as Al Frost – it only deepens his attraction to her. “In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing,” Billy tells the reader, “I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost – not necessarily in that order.”

Billy’s mother marries Richard and the three of them move into his faculty apartment on campus. Here he meets (and develops a crush on) his lifelong friend Elaine (who arouses him most when she allows him to wear her bra) and Jacques Kittredge, a debonair and macho wrestler on whom Billy develops another crush.

Even as Billy persists in this understanding of his longings as misplaced or misdirected, they define him, belong to him wholly. “I know myself best by my persistent crushes on the wrong people,” he tells the reader, “the way I was formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved.”

Billy emerges intact from the insularity of Vermont, but the assurances that should arrive with adulthood are withheld because of his bisexuality, which remains troubling to his lovers. “My very existence as a bisexual was not welcomed by my gay friends; they either refused to believe that I really liked women, or they felt I was somehow dishonest (or hedging my bets) about being gay.” His denial of category and community takes on a particular significance in the final third of the novel, when AIDS appears and he must watch as most of the characters who peopled the early part of the book die, painfully.

Does it make sense, now, to speak of late John Irving? Does In One Person bear the same relationship to The World According to Garp that, say, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night does to The Tempest? As Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to Midnight in Paris? Irving’s characters in this novel do spend a great deal of time talking about Shakespeare, about the gender-bending cross-dressing at the heart of the Elizabethan theatre, of course, but also the inextricably the comic from the tragic, and the attempt in Shakespeare’s late plays to look forward, to imagine the world as a different, more humane place.

“If you live long enough,” Billy’s stepfather, Richard Abbott, advises him, “it’s a world of epilogues.” The line takes us back to the closing pages ofGarp, the novel that made Irving a household name more than 30 years ago. “An epilogue,” according to Garp, “is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future.”

It is a deliberate echo, one that situates In One Person as a defiant response to the increasingly regressive and reactionary currents that persist on the U.S. political scene and continue to darken its horizon. This is a novel that reaffirms the centrality of Irving as the voice of social justice and compassion in contemporary American literature. His work has been iindispensable over the past four decades, and it will prove more important, more urgently resonant and more prescient, in the decades to come.

Thanks to Steven Hayward teaches in the English department at Colorado College. His most recent novel is Don’t Be Afraid.

Maya's notebook (2013) by Isabel Allende

As Maya Vidal writhes on a filthy mattress, hog-tied with an electrical cord, she wonders how much worse this confinement by killers is going to get once the pangs of her drug addictions kick in.

Readers of Isabel Allende's new novel, “Maya's Notebook,” may well wonder what else can possibly happen to this disheveled, homeless young woman. She's already seemingly hit bottom about a dozen times. Is this finally it? Is this maybe the end of her?

On the surface, we've seen this familiar fable many times before, from "Go Ask Alice" on. Addiction, recovery, relapse, re-recovery, bad men and an anchoring cast of surrounding characters who serve as magnets to the straight and narrow.

That narrator, Maya, recounts her story through the notebooks she has kept during her frenetic ride into young adulthood. Maya obviously knows how to tell a tale. She begins: "A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me."

Maya, 19, is flying to her grandmother's native Chile, where she will journey farther to a hideout in a small village in Chiloe, the archipelago off the coast. In a series of brief entries, she alternately shifts between past and present, recounting what has forced her to this remote, strangely healing place.

Since her "memory goes in circles, spirals, and somersaults," Maya decides to safely get down the facts of her family's story first. The people who become her grandparents fled Chile following the 1973 military coup (Allende's uncle, Salvador, the country's president, was killed in the takeover.) The pair meet during a Canadian exile. Their son grows up to be a pilot and marries a Danish flight attendant. The marriage doesn't take, and they cavalierly deposit their little girl, Maya, with her grandparents. The older couple now lives in a grand, colorful, old house in Berkeley, Calif., where Maya encounters wisdom, love and an atmosphere laced with folklore.

All is well until Maya turns 16, when — almost without warning — her life jumps the rails. She falls in with a couple of bad kids and starts drinking, drugging and goth-ing up. Her little posse quickly advances into crime. They answer ads placed by men looking for young girls and then violently blackmail the sleazes.

When Maya is involved in a car accident, she's forced to head up to Oregon for rehab. She escapes, but in short order is raped by a truck driver and ends up in Las Vegas, where she instantly falls under the spell of a medium-time criminal. As his courier, Maya delivers drugs to customers in the hotels and casinos and also witnesses his involvement in a counterfeiting scheme. When things go south, she's back in big trouble. Maya goes on the lam and is soon strung out and homeless on the back streets of Vegas. Her captivity on that mattress in the drug den quickly ensues.

With the miraculous help of friends and family, Maya ends up on the plane to Chile (but not before — in a scene like something out of "Breaking Bad" — burning satchels of possibly fake dollars in the desert).

Whew! This Maya's a handful. Though Allende artfully and compellingly depicts her fall from grace, the depths Maya reaches — repeatedly — and her willingness to often dig herself into a deeper hole put a nagging strain on belief.

What sets "Maya's Notebook" apart from the usual teen-in-trouble fare is the soaring redemption Maya finds in Chile. The village's peaceful pace is a tonic to both Maya and the reader. Sheltered from the havoc, she is introduced to a world of simplicity and everyday magic. It's a place where the food comes from the earth and the sea, where all property is ultimately communal, where sea lions can become friends, where drugstore medicines are used only when all other remedies fail, and where the dead sometimes make appearances.

Maya gradually comes back to life in this land of legend and folklore, helped also by the good "witches" of the island, the women who meet on the nights of the full moon for hours of sacred talk and sharing. She also unravels a few potent family secrets along the way for good measure.

While not terribly deep (and too terribly obvious in its intentions), "Maya's Notebook" is still a captivating read by a great storyteller. Allende may be overly explicit in contrasting Good Maya and Bad Maya, but it's the other dichotomies she teases out that ultimately give the novel its punch: the old world versus the new, North America versus South America, youth versus age, urban versus rural, and how the real and the unreal can unexpectedly intersect.

John Barron is the former editor-in-chief and publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in Oak Park.

After I'm gone (2013) by Laura Lippman

What an intriguing novel.  The interplay of characteristics is well cone.  Is greed at the core?

"Laura Lippman, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, returns with an addictive story that explores how one man’s disappearance echoes through the lives of the wife, mistress, and daughters he left behind.

When Felix Brewer meets Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk at a Valentine’s Dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative—if not all legal—businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes.

Though Bambi has no idea where her husband—or his money—might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. When Julie disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she’s left to join her old lover—until her remains are eventually found.

Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer.

Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And when he does, no one will ever be the same."

Thanks to www.harpercollins.com for this annotation.  

Twelve sharp (2006) by Janet Evanovich

Thanks to the Janet Evanovich official website, http://www.evanovich.com/novels/plum-series/twelve-sharp

Welcome to Trenton, New Jersey, where bounty hunter Stephanie Plum’s life is about to implode in Janet Evanovich’s wildest, hottest novel yet!

FIRST A STRANGER APPEARS
While chasing down the usual cast of miscreants and weirdos Stephanie discovers that a crazed woman is stalking her.

THEN, THE STRANGER REVEALS HER SECRETS
The woman dresses in black, carries a 9mm GLOCK, has a bad attitude and a mysterious connection to dark and dangerous Carlos Manoso… street name, Ranger.

NEXT, SOMEBODY DIES
The action turns deadly serious, and Stephanie goes from hunting skips to hunting a murderer.

SOON, THE CHASE IS ON
Ranger needs Stephanie for more reasons than he can say. And now, the two are working together to find a killer, rescue a missing child, and stop a lunatic from raising the body count. When Stephanie Plum and Ranger get too close for comfort, Vice Cop Joe Morelli (her on-again, off-again boyfriend) steps in.

Will the ticking clock stop at the stroke of twelve, or will a stranger in the wind find a way to stop Stephanie Plum… forever. Filled with Janet Evanovich’s trademark action, non-stop adventure, and sharp humor.

TWELVE SHARP shows why her novels have been called “hot stuff” (New York Times), and Evanovich herself “the master.” (San Francisco Examiner).

Originally published in hardback June 2006, St. Martin’s Press

The vanishing point (2012) by Val McDermid

Thanks to Goodreads for this brief review.

A child is brazenly abducted in the middle of a busy airport. But this is no ordinary kidnapping, because this is no ordinary child. His mother was Scarlett, a reality TV star who died tragically young from cancer. She didn't trust her disastrous family and left the care of her child to her ghost writer, Stephanie Harker. What Scarlett didn't know is that Stephanie's ex is a bitter, jealous man who will stop at nothing to destroy her life. Even if that means snatching an already traumatized child.

The Arsonist (2014) by Sue Miller

Thanks to  Catherine Blyth of "The Telegraph"  for the following review UK 9 Jul 2014.

Independence Day has an ironic tang in Pomeroy, New Hampshire, the setting of Sue Miller’s 11th novel. The Fourth of July tea marks the return of the summer people, well-heeled city migrants who like to lord it over the all-year townspeople.

This grand event is “where you started the flirtations that shifted and shifted again over the following two months”. But 1998 is a year of disillusionment, America more gripped by the Monica Lewinsky scandal than the first al-Qaeda bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Meanwhile in Pomeroy the fragile social dance is threatened, because somebody is torching the summer people’s homes.

As tensions rise, the arsonist grows bolder, a development welcomed by local newsman Bud Jacobs – not just for the story, but because it gives him a chance to befriend Frankie Rowley, an aid worker recently returned from Kenya.

In another writer’s hands The Arsonist would be a thriller, but Miller is concerned with deeper mysteries of human motivation. Her interest centres on two women in a state of emergency. At 43, Frankie has come to realise that she is “temporising” with her life, roaming from crisis to crisis. While she tussles with culture shock at a place where “the scale of things, of people’s preoccupations, seem small”, her mother, Sylvia, struggles to make a home in her holiday residence with husband, Alfie. Both women confront their choices, held to account by memories of their vivacious summer selves.Miller has been compared to Anne Tyler, and shares her uncanny compass for the contrary currents of a human heart.

 A virtuosic description of a house devoured by fire reveals the range of her talent, but she never writes for effect. Instead her subtle prose seduces with observations: the softness of a mother’s breasts yielding in a hug; the attrition of a long-haul romance, as moments that are “natural and glad and easy” grow “rarer, more and more painfully dear”.

When two characters debate whether “teensy events” constitute a “real life”, it feels as if the author is posing a similar question as to whether small-town affairs are the proper business of art. This moving novel provides a profoundly satisfying answer.

The eyes of darkness (2011 ) by Dean Koontz

THANKS TO THE POST ON SEPT 13, 2012 BY CAROLINE TRENT-GURBUZ FROM HER BLOG 'BOOK SHE READ'  Since the death of her son, Danny, in a freak accident a year ago, Tina Evans is just starting to make sense of life again. She has moved on from her divorce, and her career as a producer in Vegas is thriving; her new 10-million-dollar show, Magyck!, an extraordinary mix of magic acts, acrobatics and song and dance, is the new “It” show in the sparkly city. What doesn’t make sense in her life, however, is the strange presence in her house, the one that repeatedly writes “Not Dead” on Danny’s play chalkboard.

New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to be in Las Vegas; the glittery lights of the desert city give the holiday that extra dose of hope and shine and extravagance. Tina Evans, a veteran of the Vegas stage, knows that timing is everything, and for her multi-million dollar production, New Year’s Eve is the ideal premiere date.

The days leading up to December 31 are busy and stressful, so much so that Tina is rarely at home and rarely notices the bizarre happenings around her house. The temperature dips, door knobs ice over, the airplanes in her son’s room begin to fly, the radio turns on. Most disturbingly, the message “Not Dead” is scrawled on various surfaces.

Tina’s son, Danny, died a year earlier, and, caught up in the whirlwind of dress rehearsals and last-minute production changes, Tina is too distracted to dwell on her loss anymore. She reconciles – sort of – with her selfish and self-centered ex-husband, and she starts a relationship with widower and lawyer Eliot Stryker. The two mesh in every way, and when Tina begins to piece together the strange messages she believes she’s receiving from her dead son, Eliot is at her side, prepared to help her untangle the increasingly peculiar and dangerous mystery.

The Eyes of Darkness, despite being one of Koontz’s earlier novels, is well-written. The haunting of Tina’s house is effectively spooky, and at first glance, this novel is more of a ghost story than pure science fiction. A word of warning, however: Koontz’s descriptions are so accurate, so eerie, that The Eyes of Darkness is best for the daytime, unless the reader is a fan of horror or psychological thrillers.

The buildup to the story’s climax – the truth behind Danny’s death and the mysterious communications Tina receives from him – is deliciously suspenseful. The chemistry between Tina and her handy love interest, Stryker, powers the plot forward, and the two make a great team, evading seemingly omnipotent “bad guys” and generally being sneaky and stealthy. After they discover Danny, however, and the whos, whats, wheres, whys and hows are explained, the plot fizzles. Still, for a science fiction novel that takes place in Las Vegas, with the main character a former showgirl whose boyfriend is former Army intelligence, The Eyes of Darkness is a good book.

Police (2014) by Jo Nesbo

By Daneet Steffens

  | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT   OCTOBER 24, 2013

PETER KNUTSON

“Police” is Jo Nesbo’s tenth crime novel with inspector Harry Hole.There is a tidy little set piece more than halfway through “Police,’’ Jo Nesbo’s latest Harry Hole thriller. Coming across potential clues in a suspect’s hotel room, Hole’s team engages in a spontaneous brainstorming session. The conversation quickly shifts into overdrive, hurtling forward at a breathtakingly smart, instinct-and-impulse-driven pace with colleagues finishing each others’ sentences and thoughts in a scene that’s pure pleasure to read.After nine previous novels featuring inspector Harry Hole, this pyrotechnically assured style of writing should come as no surprise, but the delight in reading a new Nesbo novel is that he never fails to surprise. This, after all, is a writer who, with his latest police procedural, will ensure that you never look at a certain domestic appliance in quite the same way again.As“Police’’ opens, picking up after the deadly shooting at the end of 2012’s “Phantom,’’ Hole is notably absent — and will remain so without explanation for about half the book (a surprise in itself and a mystery to be unwound). His crime-squad workmates are left to their own devices, triggering a sense of restlessness as well as an underlying determination to embody Hole’s exemplary lead.

Consulting psychologist Stale Aune, who’s demoted himself to therapist, spends much of his clients’ sessions mentally kicking a wall and recalling what he relished about his work as an on-call profiler for the police: “Did he miss profiling sick souls who killed people with such gruesome acts of brutality that he was deprived of sleep at night? . . . Did he miss Hole turning him into the inspector’s image, a starved, exhausted, monomaniacal hunter? Snapping at everyone who disturbed his work on the one thing he thought had any significance, slowly but surely alienating colleagues, family and friends? . . . He missed the importance of it.”

Hole’s other associates are equally unmoored: Gunnar Hagen, head of the squad, currently bumping heads in a most frustrating manner with new police chief Mikael Bellman; special detective Katrine Bratt, who plays, literally, by the numbers and who watches “Breaking Bad,’’ “Singin’ in the Rain,’’ “Sunset Boulevard,’’ and “Toy Story 3’’ in her downtime; Beate Lonn, the forensic expert who is blessed — and cursed — with a superhuman fusiform gyrus, guaranteeing her instant facial recognition, even if someone’s altered their looks with plastic surgery; and the red-haired and eagle-eyed forensics officer Bjorn Holm

When it becomes clear that someone is killing police officers — pulverizing them, actually — at former murder investigation sites, the crew quietly pulls together into a rogue group, breaking away from official police structure and drawing on everything they’ve gleaned from Hole’s tactics as well as implementing a few of their own.

Whether describing a biker’s technique and lactic-acid sensation, the overpowering atmosphere of a drug den, the auditory reactions of a detective who thinks he may have heard a little something, the trainee police officer you really want to avoid, or the ways in which two childhood friends still dance around each other professionally and personally in adulthood, Nesbo’s got mesmerizing descriptive powers, and longtime translator Don Bartlett ensures that the images vibrate energetically on the English-language page. (I relished one character’s unfettered delight, captured with a “smile that just kept spreading across his face like a freshly cracked egg in the pan” and, in a completely different scene, the final moments of a petty, lowlife criminal: “Then — like the curtain falling after a pathetic, tormented performance lasting forty-two years — a great darkness descended.”)

In a story that encompasses political corruption, drugs, prison politics, and questionable police action as well as downright sociopathic behavior, Nesbo’s trademark intensity never flags throughout the roller-coaster waves of this highly enjoyable ride.

Daneet Steffens is a journalist and book critic.

The alphabet series A-W by Sue Granger

Having read my way from novel A is for Alibi to V is for Vengeance, I have journeyed from suspect to crime scene with Kinsey.  Her sexy, older landlord is a companion she realizes his worth his weight in gold, providing her with a safe sanctuary fashioned like a ship.  She can sail away when the going gets rough. Anxious to read W is for Wasted.  Thanks to Georgette Spelvin for the following:

"For me, reading a Sue Grafton alphabet series book is like slipping on a pair of comfortable old slippers. I live on the central California coast where the series is set (fictional Santa Teresa and ritzy Montebello are really Santa Barbara and pricey Montecito), and Grafton is meticulous when describing the area's lifestyles, geography, and history. I've known protagonist Kinsey Millhone, now in her late 30s, sinceA Is for Alibi was published in 1982. Obviously, Kinsey isn't aging as fast as I am.

Raised by a strict maiden aunt after her parents died in a car accident when she was five, Kinsey likes the stability of rules, although she often breaks them. She can be a smartass and lies easily. After a few years on the police force, she's now a private eye who's been married and divorced twice.

Kinsey is a cheapskate who cuts her own hair with a fingernail scissors and lives in scuffed boots and jeans unless something more formal is required; then, she drags out that one black dress hanging in her closet. After a bomb destroyed her old place, home is now a compact apartment fitted out like a ship's cabin, courtesy of her landlord, neighbor, and good friend, 88-year-old Henry Pitts. Henry, his older brother William, and William's Hungarian wife, Rosie, who runs her own restaurant (currently closed for fumigation), are like family to Kinsey. A few years ago, Kinsey was flabbergasted to learn her mother's relatives live in nearby Lompoc. Apparently, her wealthy grandmother was estranged from Kinsey's mother when she married Kinsey's dad; Kinsey is as eager to establish a close relationship with her mother's family as she is to walk across a minefield.
The joys and heartaches unique to family ties, the ways we damage ourselves by deceiving others, miscarriage of justice, the devastation of addiction, searching for meaning in a materialistic society, and contrasts between haves and have-nots are familiar themes in Grafton's series. In W Is for Wasted(September 2013, Putnam), these themes run through two narratives that ultimately connect two men, both dead at the book's beginning. Kinsey knew one of them: unscrupulous private detective Pete Wolinsky, shot late at night near the bird sanctuary.

Kinsey doesn't recognize the other man when a coroner's investigator asks her to view a corpse with no ID at the morgue. He was a homeless man found dead on a Santa Teresa beach. Such are the oddities of life, that a scrap of paper bearing the words "Millhone Investigations" found in a dead man's pocket makes Kinsey's life intersect with that of a morgue's John Doe. How the Kinsey who loves lying and snooping through a suspect's dresser drawers always feels compelled to do the right thing has always interested me. Somehow, she feels honor bound to find out who he is and why he needed a private investigator. Kinsey begins by tracking down his homeless companions, Pearl, Felix, and Dandy.
The character portraits of these Central Coast homeless are one of this book's strengths. And so is the look at Kinsey as she follows clues to a will, an old wrong, and new family connections before discovering the nature of the ties that bind her John Doe to private eye Pete Wolinsky.

It's sleuth work 1988 style, and it's comforting to see Kinsey still using index cards, a Smith-Corona typewriter, crisscross telephone directories (some decades-old telephone directories even include occupation and spouse's name for each listed address and phone number!), face-to-face interviews, pay phones, and folded paper maps. Narrator Kinsey is still witty and engaging, although somewhat more contemplative and subdued than usual. Dialogue, especially between squabbling family members, is terrific and sounds like something I'd actually overhear. There's a reunion atmosphere as familiar series names such as cops Jonah Robb and Con Dolan, attorney Lonnie Kingman, and private eye Morley Shine pop up. Kinsey's old beaus Cheney Phillips (does he ever drive anything but this year's red Mercedes?) and Robert Deitz make an appearance, and a Japanese bobtail joins the cast of characters.
It's enjoyable stuff, although some of the  connections between people stretch coincidence, and plot lines bringing old characters in feel manufactured, even if welcome. And, at 484 pages, it reminded me a bit of the old Hillary Waugh police procedural classic, 30 Manhattan East: A Case for Homicide North, in which the reader watches Det. Lt. Frank Sessions open the drawer of his desk, take out a pencil, sharpen it, chew the eraser, lean back in his chair.... In other words, there is much extraneous detail.

In any case, Grafton's alphabet books are popular for good reason: Kinsey is darned likable. I had fun seeing her and the regulars again and thinking about all the ways in which "W" is for wasted: wasted lives, wasted hopes, people who are "wasted" on drugs or killed. I'll be sorry when the alphabet ends."

A much younger man (1998) by Dianne Highbridge

“This book—about a 35-year-old woman who falls for the 15-year-old son of her best friend—changed the way I read newsreports about ‘pedophiles’ who have scandalous affairs with the underage. This is a headlong heartbreaker, tender but never schlocky. It deepened my sympathy for many people under the spotlight whose real stories are so much richer and more morally nuanced than the headlines suggest."  Thanks to RealSimple magazine.

Saints of the Shadow Bible (2013) by Ian Rankin

Ya gotta love Rebus!

Review by Alison Flood, 'The Observer', Nov 16, 2013

Ian Rankin has found a way to bring his long-running detective John Rebus out of retirement, but the former detective inspector has been forced to take a demotion to return to the force, and it's galling him. "Same rank as 1987?" a witness asks the newly minted detective sergeant, maliciously. "The question sliced into Rebus like a scalpel.

1. 
2. 
   

Saints of the Shadow Bible, his 20th outing, sees Rebus reporting to his former protege, Siobhan Clarke, as the pair investigate a suspicious car crash. He's also sparring with Malcolm Fox from the police complaints department over an old murder. Thirty years ago, Billy Saunders was tried for beating a man to death. The case collapsed because of the actions of Rebus's former colleagues – Saunders was a snitch, and Fox believes that despite his guilt, Summerhall CID decided he was more use on the street than in prison.

Now, following changes to the double jeopardy law, Scotland's solicitor general wants the case reopened, and the former Summerhall police officers – a close-knit gang who called themselves the Saints, and who drew a young Rebus into their number – are up for investigation.

Without excusing – or, quite, implicating – Rebus, Rankin shows just how dirty the police force was at Summerhall, how results were all that mattered, not methods. "You ever see that programme Life on Mars? It felt like a documentary," says Rebus, who in any case would need "a space the size of Ikea" to store all his own skeletons, it is pointed out sourly. His former boss, Stefan Gilmour, took the fall for the contaminated evidence and the dodgy interviews that resulted in Saunders walking free; Gilmour is now a millionaire and a big player for the "no" campaign, against Scottish independence. He and the Saints don't take kindly to being questioned, and expect Rebus to smooth the issue over for them. Taken into Fox's confidence, Rebus isn't sure which side to play for, especially when – just like 30 years ago – key evidence starts to disappear.

Rebus, says Clarke, ruefully, to Fox, is "like one of those chess wizards, the ones who play a dozen boards at the same time". So, it feels sometimes, is Rankin, as he weaves his dual plots into an ever more tangled maze, and then smoothly, oh so satisfactorily, irons them out again. Saints of the Shadow Bible is a clever, subtle read, but most of all, it's a genuine pleasure to see Rebus back in the CID. ("I'm from the 80s… I'm not the newfangled touchy feely model," he tells a suspect, irresistibly. "Now get out of my fucking car!") It's obvious Rankin feels the same way, relishing putting his old companion up against Fox and seeing the relationship develop, having a whale of a time finding out how he'll cope with demotion, investigation, authority and – of course – crime.

"Form-filling and protocols and budget meetings were not Rebus's thing – never had been and never would be. His knowledge of the internet was rudimentary and his people skills were woeful… Because he was a breed of cop that wasn't supposed to exist any more, a rare and endangered species." We know whose side Rankin is on, and we're right there behind him. A promotion for DS Rebus, please.