He had wound his window down. He could smell and hear the sea. There wasn't another soul about. He wondered: did it bother him that the world wasn't entirely fair? That justice was seldom sufficient? There would always be people ready to pocket a wad of banknotes in exchange for a favor. There would always be people who played the system and wrung out every penny. Some people--lots of people--would keep getting away with it.
"But you're not one of them," he told himself.
-The Complaints
If you'd given me the passage above out of context, I would have sworn up and down that it sounded like the musings of one Kurt Wallander. Malcolm Fox, the protagonist of The Complaints, is not quite the iconic detective Wallander is, but you can see why he's interesting company for the length of a book.
Fox is a cop working for (wait for it) the Complaints, the department that checks up on cases of possible corruption within the police force. It's not a terribly well-liked branch, as you might imagine. Fox's latest case is a troubling one: he's assigned to look in on a rising star in the force who's suspected of an interest in child pornography. Things get more complicated when that same detective, Jamie Breck, begins investigating the apparent murder of Fox's sister's no-good boyfriend. But in case that wasn't complicated enough, the whole thing spirals into a massive case of corruption that has apparently swept up Fox and Breck in its wake, and the two of them must team up to try and get to the bottom of things.
I must admit, I'm not wild about police corruption as a driving plot line. It's not terribly compelling to me, and I often find it hard to follow, as I did here. I had painful flashbacks to trying to decipher Red Riding Trilogy, which combined police corruption with jumps in time and unintelligible Yorkshire accents. Fox, as I mentioned, is a pretty good detective, but not really charismatic enough that I'd need to follow any further adventures, were Rankin to begin writing them. I enjoyed the Edinburgh setting, but I can't say it was a real page turner. I don't want to undersell the story--Rankin is clearly a talented writer--but a week after having finished The Complaints, not that much has stuck with me.
Up next: Tried starting the latest Blue Bloods book, but I'm having a hard time getting sucked in. So for now I've put that down in favor of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
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