Fleshmarket Close - Ian Rankin
Now this is what I call good detective fiction; but then I’ve thought that everything done by Mr Rankin that centred on John Rebus was good, so no surprise there. This is, I think, the nineteenth in the series, so he must be doing something right.
As in almost all of the Rebus books, action centres on Edinburgh. The skeletons of a woman and a baby are discovered under the concrete floor of a pub cellar in the eponymous Fleshmarket Close. But they turn out to be a dismantled medical skeleton (albeit from a real long-dead woman) and a plastic one respectively. So it looks as though it may be a hoax, a publicity stunt for the pub to be included in the local tourist-oriented ‘Ghost Walks’. But is it?
An Kurdish immigrant is found stabbed to death in Knoxland, a notorious high-rise estate - is it a racially-motivated murder, or something equally sinister? What else does Knoxland conceal? Rebus is reluctantly drawn into joining the investigating team.
Several years previously, a young girl had been raped in Banehall, near Edinburgh, an ex mining community that is now dependent for its employmnet on Whitemire, an old prison converted to an immigration detention centre. The perpetrator of the rape was caught and sent down, but not long afterwards, the victim committed suicide. The girl’s parents were distraught, and have now come to Rebus’ colleague, DI Siobhan Clarke - who was involved in the earlier case - to ask for help in finding their younger daughter, who has left home without warning. Her sister’s rapist has just been released from jail; perhaps this has something to do with it?
All these things are not obviously interconnected. But now, read on! For good measure, throw in cockle-picking by illegal immigrants; other immigrants being incarcerated (in the above-metioned Whitemire) pending deportation or hiding from the authorities; Rebus befriending, or being befriended by, a long-time lady protester on a Greenham Common-type vigil near the detentian centre; his old nemesis ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty. John Rebus still can’t stay away from his booze or his fags, but all in all, it makes him very human.
Up to Rankin’s usual standard - eight out of ten.
This paperback version published in 2005 by Orion Books.
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