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Summary
Summary
Nobody likes The Complaints--they're the cops who investigate other cops. It's a department known within the force as "The Dark Side," and it's where Malcolm Fox works. He's a serious man with a father in a nursing home and a sister who persists in an abusive relationship, frustrating problems about which he cannot seem to do anything. Then the reluctant Fox is given a new case. There's a cop named Jamie Breck, and he's dirty. The problem is, no one can prove it. As Fox takes on the job, he learns that there's more to Breck than anyone thinks--dangerous knowledge, especially when a vicious murder takes place far too close to home. In THE COMPLAINTS, Rankin proves again why he is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling crime writers, mixing unstoppable pacing with the deeper question of who decides right from wrong.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fans of Rankin's Det. Insp. John Rebus will be disappointed by this so-so police procedural, his second stand-alone since Rebus "retired" (after Doors Open). Malcolm Fox-call him Rebus "Lite" (he doesn't drink, he broods less, and he has none of Rebus's wit)-works for the Scottish equivalent of Internal Affairs, "Complaints and Conduct" (aka "the Complaints"), which investigates corrupt cops. Fox looks into the case of Det. Sgt. Jamie Breck, who may be trading in child pornography over the Internet. Meanwhile, when Vince Faulkner, Fox's sister's lover and abuser, turns up dead, Fox becomes a murder suspect. A torturously complicated plot follows involving the suspicious suicide of a failing property developer, large-scale money laundering, and crookedness at every level of Scottish society, but nothing's really at stake. As always with Rankin, Scotland itself is a main character-"the whole of Scotland's in meltdown," says Fox-and that may be this tepid novel's main attraction. 10-city author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Yes, I know Rankin is a crime writer and shouldn't mix with arty-farty novelists, but a lot of snooty people disdain crime fiction and this is such a brilliant book it deserves a wider audience. No DI Rebus any more, alas, but Insp Malcolm Fox, from the department that polices the police, is every bit his equal as a character. As for the plot, I cannot heap it with greater praise than to say that it is as complicated and satisfying as Trollope's Dr Thorne. I should have waited for the unabridged version from Whole Story Audio, due out for Christmas, but I couldn't. Besides, it's a good excuse to compare readers. Ebullient James Macpherson will be a hard act to follow. Caption: article-audio.3 Yes, I know Rankin is a crime writer and shouldn't mix with arty-farty novelists, but a lot of snooty people disdain crime fiction and this is such a brilliant book it deserves a wider audience. - Sue Arnold.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the wake of Exit Music (2008), the concluding volume in his celebrated John Rebus series,Rankin has picked a most unlikely new hero. Edinburgh cop Malcolm Fox works for the Complaints, the despised internal-affairs division whose job it is to investigate other cops. Succeeding the Rebus novels, starring the quintessential maverick copper, with a series built around a cop-hunting cop seems akin to J. K. Rowling following Harry Potter with seven extra-thick novels about a classroom tattletale. And, yet, Rankin pulls it off, making Fox the fall guy in an elaborate police conspiracy and causing him to join forces with a detective under suspicion of peddling child porn. The strange-bedfellows angle drives the interpersonal dynamics here and augurs well for future installments as Fox, working off the books, investigates the murder of someone very close to home and attempts to turn the frame-up on its end. Some crime writers keep writing the same series with different characters, but Rankin deserves credit for going another way altogether. Fox is a good and quiet citizen compared to Rebus (he doesn't drink and listens to birdsong on the radio, not classic rock), but Rankin doesn't hold any of that against his new hero, proving that you can build complex, highly textured, series-worthy characters from the most unlikely of raw materials. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new series from the internationally best-selling Rankin is very big news in the mystery world, and his publisher will spread the word in every conceivable way even including transit ads in New York and San Francisco.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The archetypal American private eye is a good man who atones for his bad deeds by performing selfless acts of courage on behalf of others. Walter Mosley started Leonid McGill on that existential journey in "The Long Fall" by providing his New York P.I. with a murky history as a mob fixer. WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE (Riverhead, $26.95) finds McGill three books into the series but unable to shake his underworld connections - as a personal favor he's undertaking a search for the lost friend of a powerful crime boss. But there are other pressing matters to be taken care of: a man who has been like a father to him lies dying in McGill's apartment, McGill's wife is sleeping with a man half her age and if McGill doesn't get a paying job he won't be able to pay the rent on his office. ("And those were just the devils I knew.") For a healthy retainer, McGill takes the case of a nervous wife who suspects her billionaire husband of having an affair and planning to murder her to avoid a messy divorce. McGill is nobody's fool ("Most people I meet I cannot trust, believe, or believe in."), but while he can tell this woman is lying through her teeth, he senses her desperation and responds to the "underlying reality" of her tall tale. With all the dissemblers in this twisted plot, Mosley's compassionate shamus finds plenty of opportunity to apply his insight. At 55, McGill fears time may run out before he can do what needs to be done to redeem his honor: purge himself of the "anger issues" that once gave him an edge in the boxing ring, forgive the father he has hated all his life and save his own sons from repeating his mistakes. In the meantime, he can make reparation for "a thousand crimes committed without remorse" by doing kindnesses for strangers. And that's where Mosley's genius for characterization comes in. Unlike the flamboyant criminals who swagger through Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels, the characters who catch your eye here are people who are normally invisible: old folks living on the edges of society and young black men with "no notion of their history and no hope for a future except what they were told by the TV." The qualities that make McGill fit to be their hero are the same ones that make him the quintessential New Yorker: he sees it all and knows it all and somehow feels responsible for it all. In her fearless first novel, SO MUCH PRETTY (Simon & Schuster, $25), Cara Hoffman demolishes our illusions about country life by addressing the problems of poverty, domestic abuse, teenage violence and environmental damage that are threatening to destroy the small communities of rural America. Gene and Claire Piper, newly married doctors who worked in a free clinic on Manhattan's Lower East Side, thought they'd escaped the curse of modern civilization when they moved to a depressed upstate town and turned to organic farming. But years later, when their daughter, Alice, is in high school, their neighbors still consider them outsiders. Precociously brilliant Alice is even more of an alien, though she doesn't realize it until the murder of a local girl makes her aware of the community's hateful attitudes toward women. For all the passion in this intense narrative, Hoffman writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain. She also shows a mastery of her craft by developing the story over 17 years and narrating it from multiple perspectives. While each has a different take on the horrific events that no one saw coming, the people who live in this insular place remain willfully blind to their own contributions to the deeper causes that made this tragedy almost inevitable. Ian Rankin retired John Rebus, his moody, broody Edinburgh cop, just as Scotland was becoming unbearably interesting. But Inspector Malcolm Fox, who makes his first appearance in THE COMPLAINTS (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $24.99) as a special investigator into police corruption, seems equally well positioned to take the pulse of the city in 2009, a time of mass layoffs and spiking unemployment. To a cop, the question is what all this means for organized crime, which has lost its easy access to money-laundering sources now that real estate development has dried up and the building trades have collapsed. Even for Rankin, who lives to obfuscate, this is a dense and complicated plot, featuring desperate mobsters and the crooked cops who would like to help them out. But it's a good introduction to the sober Fox and his younger partner, Jamie Breck, a master player of a computer game Rankin has whimsically named Quidnunc. LEARNING TO SWIM (Crown, $24) is the perfect romantic suspense mystery for people who won't admit they read romantic suspense mysteries. Sara J. Henry opens her first novel like a pro, at the tense moment when a young woman taking a ferry across Lake Champlain jumps overboard to rescue a child who's been tossed from a boat going in the opposite direction. Troy Chance, a sportswriter who lives in Lake Placid, keeps the traumatized boy in her care until she can determine who tried to kill him, a puzzle Henry efficiently resolves in the final scenes. But the throbbing heart of the story is right out of "Jane Eyre," with Troy installed as the boy's guardian in the Tudor mansion of his powerfully attractive father while the police diligently search (everywhere but the attic) for his missing wife. The tension holds up surprisingly well, although it doesn't pay to examine the logic of the situation too closely. Walter Mosley's P.I. tries to make reparation for a thousand crimes committed without remorse.'
Library Journal Review
Internationally best-selling author/Edgar Award winner Rankin's (www.ianrankin.net) latest police procedural is the first in a new series featuring Edinburgh cop Malcolm Fox, a member of "The Complaints," a team that investigates purportedly dirty cops. The job means shutting down corruption while trying to maintain relationships with coworkers on the beat. This current case involves a convoluted conspiracy to discredit Fox and protect a seriously bad cop. As performed by Scottish actor Peter Forbes, cosmopolitan Edinburgh comes alive as a city with a gritty underside. While some Rankin fans may miss Inspector Rebus, most will want to become better acquainted with the equally complex Fox. Of particular interest to fans of Denise Mina and Michael Robotham; a great choice for all mystery lovers. [The Reagan Arthur: Little, Brown hc also received a starred review, LJ 1/11; the Back Bay pb will publish in November 2011.-Ed.]-Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.