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The UK’s bestselling crime writer talks about the second in his new series of novels featuring Malcolm Fox from the internal affairs department of Edinburgh Police. Fox and his team are sent to Fife to investigate whether officers covered up for a corrupt colleague. The trail leads to a brutal murder committed with a weapon that should not exist and back to 1985 when terrorists intent on engineering a split between Scotland and the UK were plotting kidnap and murder.

Ian Rankin lives in Edinburgh and the city forms a backdrop to his Inspector Rebus and Malcolm Fox novels. He wrote the first of his 18 Rebus novels, Knots and Crosses, in 1987. The books have been dramatised for television and translated into 36 languages. He is the winner of prestigious awards for crime writing both in the UK and in the United States.

Though an acknowledged master of the crime genre, Rankin says he did not set out to be a crime writer but rather to be a writer of mainstream fiction. Indeed, his novels have a rich social dimension, portraying a dark and morally complex Scotland, that has led to the coining of the phrase ‘Tartan Noir’.