Is there to be no peace for John Rebus? Long since retired, and supposedly keeping his hand in by working through some cold cases, Edinburgh's finest is called into action once more in A Song for the Dark Times (Orion, £19.99), Ian Rankin's 23rd Rebus novel.
This time it’s personal: when his estranged daughter Samantha calls to say that her husband Keith has gone missing, Rebus heads for the wild Scottish north coast, where he discovers that Samantha herself is a suspect in Keith’s disappearance. Back in Edinburgh, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox investigate the murder of Salman bin Mahmoud, the playboy son of a Saudi dissident.
The political and social ramifications of Brexit provide the contemporary backdrop, although Rebus also finds himself delving deep into the past when he discovers that Keith’s disappearance is likely linked to a murder that took place in a prisoner-of-war camp during the second World War.
Always unconventional, the retired Rebus is by now a delightfully cantankerous character, relentlessly seeking out the truth even if that means thwarting police investigations (“for the umpteenth time”) or investigating his own daughter for murder. Laconically understated in tone and style, A Song for the Dark Times is a solid mystery underpinned by Rebus’s fascinating appraisal of what he has achieved during his storied career.
Andrea Carter’s Benedicta “Ben” O’Keeffe is an amateur sleuth in the Miss Marple mould, a solicitor with a tiny practice in the town of Glendara on the Inishowen Peninsula in the far north of Donegal (any farther north, in fact, and O’Keeffe would be the first fictional detective to straddle Nordic and Celtic Noir).
Carter's fifth novel, The Body Falls (Constable, £8.99), opens with such a torrential downpour that even the Donegal natives, no strangers to a spot of rain, are moved to describe it as biblical. The apocalyptic weather is blamed when a body falls on to the roof of the local vet's jeep as she negotiates the hairpin bends of Mamore Gap. But then it's discovered that the dead man, charity boss Bob Jameson, has died of snakebite.
Carter’s novels hark back to the halcyon days of Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey, when the most unlikely murderers lurked in the shrubbery and every plot was a fiendish puzzle, but it’s the blending of the classic tropes into the bleak, raw-boned setting of the Inishowen Peninsula that sets her books apart.
Anja de Jager's A Death at the Hotel Mondrian (Little, Brown, £14.99) opens with a neat twist, when Amsterdam detective Lotte Meerman is approached by a man who insists that he is not dead, only to take his own life later that morning. But was the man really who he claimed to be? De Jager's fifth Meerman novel is an engrossing tale of doppelgängers and mistaken identities as Lotte re-examines cold cases from three decades previously, much to the dismay of her peers and superiors.
Sexual abuse, institutionalised racism and religious fundamentalism all have their part to play as Lotte, applying contemporary science to old investigations, finds herself excavating long-buried horrors in the Netherlands’ “Bible Belt”. Most intriguing of all is Meerman herself, who is as motivated to cover up her own failings as she is by the prospect of bringing the truth to light.
Charlotte Philby's second novel, A Double Life (Borough Press £12.99), is as innovative a spy novel as we might expect from the granddaughter of Kim Philby. Foreign office negotiator Gabriela is dispatched from Whitehall to Moscow for a seven-month secondment; when she returns to London, she has secrets to keep from her boss and her husband. Meanwhile, journalist Isobel has witnessed a young woman being brutally murdered on Hampstead Heath, a murder that subsequently appears not to have happened. Has Isobel somehow imagined it all?
Philby evokes the classic tropes of the spy novel here but invests them with the emotional and claustrophobic intensity of domestic noir: Gabriela and Isobel may be pawns in the Great Game, but their greatest fears aren’t faceless assassins but those they should be able to trust above all others. The result is a gripping account of two complex lives, even if it ends rather abruptly, and before the consequences of the women’s actions play out to the bitter end.
Anthony J Quinn established his considerable reputation with his series of Celsius Daly novels, which were set in the murky post-Troubles world on the shores of Lough Neagh. Setting has always been important to Quinn, and never more so than in Turncoat (No Exit Press, £9.99), his fourth standalone novel: choosing Station Island on Lough Derg as the venue for a showdown between the Catholic RUC detective Desmond Maguire and the mysterious informer "Ruby" is a stroke of genius.
The novel is set in 1994, with the impossible dream of peace in Northern Ireland at stake. But while we’re in spy novel territory (Maguire is “waiting for my lies or a figure like George Smiley to catch up with me”), this is also a study of a deeply conflicted man whose career is swiftly approaching the end of “a sad trajectory through the purgatories of his accursed country”.
There’s a nightmarish and even Kafkaesque quality to Maguire’s lonely self-communion, as the detective, disorientated by hunger, a lack of sleep and fortifying nips of poteen, grows increasingly suspicious, paranoid and ultimately deranged.
Beautifully written – our first glimpse of Station Island is of “a long, thin ecclesiastical city, half-submerged, half-floating on the water, surrounded by spirals of mist and the gloomy shoreline of pine forest” – and revelling in its old-fashioned notions of penance, purgatory and redemption, Turncoat is a noir in which Calvinist predestination collides with Catholic guilt.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
