Making a Scottish/British Crime Series Powerfully New Again: MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Ian Rankin

A quick count suggests that MIDNIGHT AND BLUE is the 24th novel in the deeply admired Inspector Rebus series from Ian Rankin. Along with similar protagonists, like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, John Rebus has reached retirement age. How can a man whose life is framed by his investigative work manage the transition?

Shockingly, it seems Rebus will have to manage it in a dangerous prison, HMP Edinburgh, surrounded by criminals who have good reason to hate and threaten him. "Rebus felt hemmed in, not only by walls but bu the same daily faces too. He had visited the prison many times during his detective years — he recalled being shown the Hanging Shed, now demolished -- but this was different. The various smells were never going to be showered away.  ... Prison, nick, jail, chokey, inside -- many names but only one game: incarceration." 

There's only sparse explanation of how he's landed here with a life sentence, a result of bodily threatening a criminal who minutes later died of a heart attack. Clearly, Rebus's many slippery judgement calls and careless antagonisms of the past must have caught up with him as the courts ground him in their teeth. Protected briefly in solitary confinement, then pressed into the population of his old enemies and, of course, the antagonisms among them, it seems he's only surviving because the death that cost his freedom proved highly advantageous to gang leader Darryl Christie, who's offered to protect him (more or less). 

Of course, Christie is powerful, menacing, and in Rebus's estimation, quite mad. So that protection immediately equals additional danger. Too bad there isn't time to sort it out any further before Rebus's miseries are compounded by a death inside the prison, and fresh expectations from both the investigators and the prison's governor that Rebus will help solve this murder. To do so would quickly mean his death at the hands of the other prisoners, though. Or would it?

It's no spoiler to admit that all the action of this very high-action crime novel takes place in one dangerous week of Rebus's incarceration. Walking with him through the seeming impossibility of crime-solving while balancing threats around him is fascinating and suspenseful, and Rankin provides plenty of aggressive and startling twists along the way.

British cover.

MIDNIGHT AND BLUE will also satisfy readers who want a chance at the better side of human nature despite darkness and violence. Rankin's final acknowledgment shows he knows exactly what he's painstakingly built into this book: "I am grateful to staff and inmates (present and past) who spoke to me and allowed me to tour the facilities. I have taken a few necessary liberties, but I hope I have also managed to show that prisons are places where compassion and hope can be manifested on all sides."

In other words -- you might think you know the author, and the series, but this is a must-read to add to the experience. On my bookshelves, it's hanging around for a second delicious reading over the winter. 

Oh yes, the publisher is Mulholland (aka Little, Brown); I like the British (Scottish) cover design better than the American.

Most Unusual Serial Killer Novel Yet: DAUGHTER OF ASHES by Ilaria Tuti

November is almost done; today's unexpected glimpses opf blazing blue skies hint at the brighter, coler weather ahead here in Vermont. Winter is a time to be selective, to pick up only the best mysteries and crime fiction, ones that will pin us into snug reading rooms and give us heartfelt potential growth.

Serial killer crime fiction often settles into one of two categories: either bloody and horrific and terrifying (those Hannibal Lecter types), or hard-pressed beahvioral analysis against a ticking clock (some Jeffery Deaver books, and every episode of Criminal Minds).

Italian author Ilaria Tuti, in a powerful and flowing translation from Ekin Oklap, concludes a remarkable crime fiction / police procedural trilogy with DAUGHTER OF ASHES. Her protagonist is police superintendent Teresa Battaglia, who battled her way to a Northern Italy superintendent slot despite her gender, holding a firm grip on a department of mostly men and using her personal losses as added incentives to break open cases.

As Teresa arrives at a maximum security prison, her staunch ally Inspector Massimo Marini awaits her. The pair haven't seen each other in two weeks, since they broke the case featured in book 2 of the series, The Sleeping Nymph. Their presence at the prison is because serial murderer Giacomo Mainardi wants Teresa's help and has called for her to come see him. After all, he'll never be out of prison—where she helped confine him 27 years earlier.

The narrative alternates between "Today" and "Twenty-seven years ago." Tuti maintains fierce suspense in both timelines, and each offers a poignant sense of loss: Discovering how much Teresa lost in the past won't happen until there's a workable explanation of what Giacomo is up to now, however. And Marini isn't just there to back up his superintendent—Teresa wants him to learn how the brilliantly insightful Giacomo can assess and attack emotionally. It is, after all, the core of how he's chosen his victims and what the coded clues he lays out indicate.

And Teresa wants very much to both teach and protect Marini, who's become part of her "family of choice" (or maybe of necessity) in her later years:

Now that they were finally face to face again, they took a moment to study each other. It had scarcely been twenty days since they'd closed the case of the Sleeping Nymph, and they both still bore its scars: a bout of sciatica for her, a few burns and bruises for Inspector Marini. But how his eyes blazed. Teresa saw in him the young officer she had once been, sleep-deprived and desperately eager to prove herself. He was already primed to dive into a fresh case, and he wanted Teresa to go with him—unaware that she had already fallen into this particular vortex before, nearly thirty years ago.

Although Teresa will struggle throughout this new case with her own ailments, physical, mental, and emotional (doing her best only to reveal the physical), instructing and protecting Marini drives her to keep taking risks. What Marini can't understand or accept, however, is her apparent bond with the killer. Is this what it takes to analyze a serial murderer? He's repulsed by the notion that his policing mentor might think she has something in common with the monster behind bars.

It's increasingly clear that this is likely to be Teresa's final effort on the police force, although how she'll convey the reasons to Marini is still unclear. When Giacomo sends them chasing evidence at an archaeologically significant crypt, she learns how serious her disabilities have already become. But still, she needs Marini to understand Giacomo the way she already does:

"Most people think of Giacomo as a sadist, but I never got that impression." She hadn't spoken at all for the last two hours, not since her blunder at the crypt—a moment which, like all decisive acts, had proven to be revelatory. Her voice sounded hoarse, and guilty. She cleared her throat. "The amputations always occurred after the victim's death; the aim was never to cause suffering, but to take the life of those who were deemed—symbolically—not to deserve life at all."

Not only are readers walking into dark places with this investigator, but she will have to draw Marini along into how she approaches criminal analysis. In the process, she may be forced to reveal her private losses and damage, because they may be part of what drives Giacomo Mainardi. And it seems he has the capacity to keep on killing.

Immaculately plotted and intricate, DAUGHTER OF ASHES sets a new bar for fictional investigations of  murder. Whether Teresa can convince Marini, or us, that empathy for Giacomo is both humane and important to solving his crimes acts as an added strand of powerful suspense, in a book that also probes the most painful and enduring of our losses.

From Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press, releasing on December 5.