''The Impossible Dead'' is a 2011 novel written by the Scottish author
Ian Rankin. It is the second novel in the Malcolm Fox series.
Plot
Inspector
Malcolm Fox and his team from the
Lothian and Borders Police department of “Complaints” (Professional Ethics and Standards), Tony Kaye and Joe Naysmith, are assigned to an investigation in the town of
Kirkcaldy
Kirkcaldy ( ; ; ) is a town and former royal burgh in Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. It is about north of Edinburgh and south-southwest of Dundee. The town had a recorded population of 49,460 in 2011, making it Fife's second-largest s ...
in
Fife
Fife ( , ; ; ) is a council areas of Scotland, council area and lieutenancy areas of Scotland, lieutenancy area in Scotland. A peninsula, it is bordered by the Firth of Tay to the north, the North Sea to the east, the Firth of Forth to the s ...
. Detective Sergeant Paul Carter has been found guilty of misconduct, and Fox’s job is to reassure the
Fife Constabulary that the other Kirkcaldy police are clean. Fox visits Paul’s uncle Alan Carter, who had reported Paul, and is drawn into the murder investigation when Alan is killed and Paul is framed for it. Fox and his team must dodge, while exploiting as sources, not only the hostile Kirkcaldy police but contingents of Fife headquarters CID, Murder Squad, and even an emissary from London’s
Special Branch.
When Fox visited him, Alan Carter was investigating the suspicious 1985 death of an Edinburgh lawyer named Francis Vernal,
who was involved with
Scottish Nationalist paramilitaries in the 1980s, including
Dark Harvest, a terrorist group trying to use
anthrax. Fox becomes obsessed by Vernal’s story, in part because there are similarities between Vernal’s death and Carter’s murder. He interviews various former associates of Vernal, including his onetime law partner, his widow, a madman, a TV personality, and a Chief Constable who is herself trying to deal with a group of terrorists. Eventually Fox identifies the person who killed both Vernal and Carter, but Fox has to risk his own life to capture them.
Structure and place
The novel takes place over about three weeks. Most of the investigations are in Fife, but the team returns to Edinburgh every night. Interwoven with the investigations is Fox’s relationship with his father and sister, marked by his father’s suffering a stroke.
This is the second of Rankin’s novels to feature Malcolm Fox as the sole protagonist, following ''
The Complaints''. He is a minor antagonist (with very little attention paid to his point of view) in ''Standing in Another Man's Grave,'' the novel which follows, where
John Rebus is the main protagonist. In the novel after that, ''
Saints of the Shadow Bible'', Fox and Rebus work together on a case and come to respect each other.
[Ian Rankin discusses Fox's role in these two novels and the fan reaction to Fox's role as antagonist in ''Standing in Another Man's Rain'', in a video interview from September 2013]
SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE: Rebus and Malcolm Fox
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Impossible Dead
2011 British novels
Novels by Ian Rankin
Novels set in Scotland
Fife
Orion Books books