MIDNIGHT AND BLUE

Just because he’s in prison doesn’t mean John Rebus can’t keep solving crimes, even if he does need a little help from outside.

Convicted of attempted murder after his attempt to scare Morris Gerald Cafferty—the unsavory client he’d taken on while working as an unofficial private eye in A Heart Full of Headstones (2022)—led to the man’s fatal heart attack, Rebus has been doing time in HMP Edinburgh. Howard Tennent, the prison governor, wants to move him from isolation to the general population in Trinity, where Cafferty’s successor, Darryl Christie, guarantees to protect him (yeah, right). Things work out less well for Jackie Simpson, who’s been jailed for breaking into a nail bar owned by Everett Harrison, an enforcer for Liverpool refugee smuggler Shay Hanlon. Simpson’s found stabbed to death, his cellmate Mark Jamieson knocked out by drugs that mysteriously got into his system. As Rebus asks cautious questions around his cellblock while trying not to annoy anyone (quite a stretch for him), his former colleague DI Siobhan Clarke hunts for missing schoolgirl Jasmine Andrews. The two cases couldn’t be more remote from each other—until the murder of ex-footballer Zak Campbell forges a link between them without giving the slightest indication of who’s guilty. That may be because almost everyone in Police Scotland looks just as guilty as the inmates at Trinity. The special appeal of the entry in this celebrated series is its vividly detailed portrait of the labyrinthine corridors of power in the prison, where everything is available for a price, and its unsettling connections to the corridors of power outside.

It’s inspiring to see that prison, along with the rotten system it represents, hasn’t gotten Rankin’s battered hero down.