Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels have often taken inspiration from the grimmer events of the real world — from Dunblane to people trafficking — to darken even further the novelist’s imagined one. So it comes as no great surprise that, in this investigation, Detective Inspector Rebus is pursuing leads in the days before the London bombings of July 7. The Naming of the Dead, as its title suggests, is devoted to memorialising, recalling the fallen of the Iraq war and Rebus’s own brother, as well as the victims of the latest outbreak of mayhem in Edinburgh. But the first thing the book makes you remember (at least if you’re English, or a Londoner) is that, in the week before 7/7, the “eyes of the world” were meant to be on Scotland. The G8 meeting at Gleneagles was accompanied by the usual influx of protesters and had its fair share of “trouble”, but Rankin is also keen to describe the optimism that accompanied that month’s Make Poverty History campaign.

The case before Rebus and his detective sergeant, Siobhan Clarke, the younger sidekick who tries with varying success not to turn into Rebus in drag, is a classic combination of the humdrum and the rarefied. The victims range from a selection of recidivist sexual assaulters who all appear on a vigilante website, to a government PPS (plunging, unusually picturesquely for Rankin, from the walls of the castle) and a loudly Christian councillor.

The G8 conference offers Rebus the perfect opportunity to tell truth to power, or at least to raise a pint of heavy ironically in its direction. As well as driving his chief constable and a Special Branch commander to distraction with his toes-treading investigative methods, Rebus even manages to land himself within feet of President Bush. The leader of the free world is, characteristically, evoked not while glad-handing his fellow chiefs, but as he comes off his mountain bike after attempting a cheeky wave.

In between all the wisecracking and eyebrow-raising, however, Rebus and Clarke begin to think they have stumbled onto something “big”. The involvement of the councillor at one end of the case, and an arms dealer with fingers in a trayful of political pies at the other, hints at a grand conspiracy. But Rankin shows us that it is a professional handicap of policemen (or, more accurately, of crime writers, for whom the complexity of the mystery can obscure the humanity of the pieces on the board) to look for a pattern where none exists. “Sometimes it felt to Rebus that he was close to seeing the mechanism which connected everything. Close . . . but never quite close enough.” In the middle of a city-centre riot, Clarke has the same impression, as the day’s images bombard her: “They all seemed incredibly vivid to her, snapshots bright with a significance she couldn’t quite determine.” She makes the connection to her academic father’s discipline of semiotics, but here Rankin resists the temptation to dig deeper, ending the thought process with a pun. If it’s not unfair to find fault with a writer who continues to inhabit his genre more completely than any other practitioner, Rankin makes a habit of drawing back from “profundity” of this kind — entirely in keeping, of course, with Rebus’s combination of denial and obsession. Nobody could carry on as relentlessly as the DI does without shutting down some of his reactions to all he has seen.

Profundity of another kind, and a much more rewarding one, is on offer. Rankin refuses to allow his dead to remain “unnamed”, forcing readers to confront their reactions to the appearance of each one, to rethink prejudices, and then, when mass murder on the scale of the bombings arrives, to think again in terms of individuals. Rebus may seem always to be running on something very near empty, but there is no sign that Rankin has lost any of the energy to continue this consistently impressive series.

David Horspool is an editor on the TLS. The Naming of the Dead is available at the Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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