The Complaints

✍ Scribed by Rankin, Ian

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 315 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780316039741

✦ Synopsis

From

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. --Bill Ott

Review

PRAISE FOR THE COMPLAINTS :

"Rankin is a master at what, for me, is one of the important aspects of a crime novel: the integration of setting, plot, characters and a theme which, for Rankin, is the moral dimension never far from his writing. . . . Fox is so fully realised and interesting a character, his job in "the complaints" so fraught with fascinating possibilities, that we can surely hope to meet him again."

(The Guardian _PD James _ )

"With its Edinburgh setting, suave crime lords and renegade officers, The Complaints will be familiar territory to Rebus fans -- even if its hero isn't. Getting to know this man, an intriguing mix of apathy and action, is almost like a courtship--each new situation reveals something that makes the reader want to know yet more."
(The Independent _Rebecca Armstrong _ )

"Rankin delivers . . . an excellent cop novel full of action, good dialogue, well-crafted characters and an authentic backdrop."
(The Times _Marcel Berlins _ )