Complaints are policemen who investigate fellow policemen’s cases. Malcolm Fox is one of them. He is an elderly man with strange taste in clothing, he works in Edinburgh in the Complaints and Conduct department of the force (Complaints for short), he struggles with his own family problems, a fragile and ancient father in an old age home, and a sister who is abused by her aggressive partner. Fox is given a case of a young, confident, and handsome colleague, Jamie Breck, accused of being involved with child pornography. The two of them slowly form a friendship, and in the meanwhile Fox finds out more and more about odd things concerning Breck’s case. Now both of them are in grievous danger, and soon a sadistic and gory murder occurs, too close to Fox’s family…
The Complaints is a gripping crime/detective novel right from Britain. Its Scottish author, Ian Rankin (known for Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek) is one of the most popular and best-selling contemporary suspense - crime fiction writers, and righteously so. He keeps the Scottish literacy traditions of the great old ones like Robert Louis Stevenson, combined with a clear and straightforward prose and a brilliant and modern plot. His world of detective and police is a tad male-oriented, true - but what could we expect after his infamous remark about female authors, lesbians in particular, who write the most violent and gory fiction. Well, we can take it as a compliment for ladies: violent novels are awesome novels. If we shy away from graphic scenes, we would get mostly boring books.
The Guardian writes about Rankin and The Complaints:
„Rankin is a master at what, for me, is one of the important aspects of a crime novel: the integration of setting, plot, characters and a theme which, for Rankin, is the moral dimension never far from his writing.
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