Old friends and foes reunite in Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild (Little Brown, library hardcover), the 20th novel featuring maverick Edinburgh copper John Rebus. A month into his latest retirement, Rebus gets drawn into a case with detectives Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox when someone takes a potshot at Big Ger Cafferty, a local crime boss well known to the detectives. Cafferty grudgingly reveals to Rebus that he’d received a handwritten death threat, which looks like a tie to the recent murder of elderly Lord Minton, which Clarke is investigating. Meanwhile, Fox is seconded to a unit of cops from Glasgow keeping an eye on gangster Joe Stark, who may be trying to expand his territory. When Stark’s son and heir apparent is offed, suspicion falls on Cafferty and his rival, Dennis Christie. But appearances are deceiving.
It’s a puzzle, all right, one eventually incorporating the death of a lottery winner and the dark history of Acorn House, a now-closed juvenile detention home. A side story finds Fox, a former internal complaints cop, suspicious of the Glasgow crew but pulled away to his dying father’s bedside. Still, the relationships among the characters, especially the wary respect between Rebus and Cafferty, power the novel. They’re a couple of old dogs used to being lone wolves. Don’t count them out.
Alafair Burke blends legal procedural and domestic drama in her compulsively readable The Ex (HarperCollins, digital galley), giving it an extra spin for good measure. Olivia Randall is a smart, strong-willed New York City defense attorney, but she vividly remembers what it’s like to be young and in love when teenage Buckley Harris asks for help. It’s not Buckley who’s in trouble, but her father Jack, a successful author who is now a suspect in a triple homicide. He’s also Olivia’s ex-fiance, and because she’s the one who dumped him and broke his heart, she figures she owes him. Besides, the nice guy she once knew couldn’t possibly be a killer.
At first, it looks like she’s right about Jack. The evidence is circumstantial, although his reason for being in the vicinity is admittedly far-fetched. Then it turns out Jack has ties to one of the victims. Three years ago, Jack’s wife Molly was killed in a mass shooting at Penn Station; the gunman was a disturbed teen, whose father had refused to get him psychiatric help. The father is now dead, and there’s gunshot residue on Jack’s shirts. Olivia’s growing doubts collide with her memories, which Burke parcels out piecemeal. I may have recognized a plot twist from an old Law and Order episode, but The Ex still kept me flipping pages.
Benjamin Black’s 1950s Dublin pathologist Quirke is a moody fellow at the best of times, but he’s more melancholy than usual in Even the Dead (Henry Holt, digital galley). But he has good reason as the city swelters in a summer heat wave. Coming off a long convalescence at the home of his adoptive brother Mal, Quirke is intrigued when he determines the death of a young man in a burning car was not an accident. Then a young woman claiming to be pregnant with the dead man’s child contacts Quirke’s daughter Phoebe for help, then vanishes. Quirke and his old pal Inspector Hackett pick at several old threads before unraveling a case leading back to the great and the good, church and state. It also carries echoes of the murder of Christine Falls, the subject of the first Quirke novel.
The past continues to cast long shadows over Quirke’s life, and Black — a pen name of writer John Banville — is at his best evoking the aging doctor’s intimations of mortality even as a new love enters his life.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 
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