Rebus: Long Shadows - Ian Rankin & Rona Munro

I began 2019 hoping to fill in the gaps of a few crime series that I only started reading when the series were already a few books old. Among those was Ian Rankin’s John Rebus books, one of my favorite series of them all. As a result, the last two Rebus books I’ve read are 1987’s Knots and Crosses, which was the very first Rebus book, and 2019’s Rebus: Long Shadows, a brand new stage play featuring Rebus. In the first, Rebus was introduced as a 41-year-old cop; in the play, he is a retired cop in such poor physical condition that stairs are a challenge and he is as likely to fly as engage a suspect in a foot-chase. The good news is that Rebus is still Rebus; the bad news is that Rebus has a past that is catching up with him.

John Rebus allows his past to haunt him. He doesn’t spend any time thinking about his successes, all those bad guys he and his fellow cops have taken off the streets in the last three decades. Instead, he thinks about the ones who got away – and the young women they raped and murdered. He sees these women in his dreams, and he has long conversations with them in his head. Rebus knows, too, that time is running out for him. If he is ever to put away his longtime nemesis “Big Ger” Cafferty, a crime boss he’s been chasing for twenty-five years, he is going to have to do it soon. The irony is that, of all the people in the world, “Big Ger” is perhaps the one who understands John Rebus best; their shared past forever binds them. They may not  be friends, but they are much more than just enemies on different sides of the law. 

Ian Rankin and Rona Munro

And then one night, Rebus comes across a young woman on the stairs waiting for one of his apartment neighbors to come home. He doesn’t know her, but he remembers her mother, the victim of one of those unsolved murder cases that he thinks about so often. Determined to finally find the woman’s killer, Rebus begins to ask questions, questions that will lead to yet another confrontation with “Big Ger,” a conversation with the power to ruin the career of the only real friend he still has, DI Siobham Clarke. 

In his introduction to Rebus: Long Shadows, Ian Rankin tells us that the play is set in “a parallel world that is almost identical,” one in which Rankin and co-author Rona Munro “have played with elements of Rebus’s history – and Cafferty’s – to make for an engrossing two hours of theatre.” The differences, whatever they may be, are subtle enough that most readers are unlikely to be troubled by them, if they notice them at all. 

Bottom Line: Rebus: Long Shadows works surprisingly well and manages to add another complex chapter to the John Rebus story within the concise parameters of a stage play. In the play, Rebus reveals just what a complicated and driven man he is today, and that he is still capable of out-maneuvering those who think they finally have him where they want him. This is a worthy addition to the John Rebus series and should be read as such. As Rankin says, “In Edinburgh, that most special of cities, Rebus knows the dead don’t always rest quietly, while the living remain troubled and – just occasionally – deadly dangerous.” Unemployed or not, John Rebus is far from done.

Scene from the Play in which Rebus is being "haunted" by Victims of Two Unsolved Murder Cases