The Heights by Ian Rankin review: 'ingenious'
In Ian Rankin’s first standalone thriller in two decades, DS Gillian Gish investigates a murder at a luxury residential tower overlooking Hyde Park. Review by David Robinson
It has been over three decades since Ian Rankin set any fiction in London, and when he last sent John Rebus there in 1992’s Tooth and Nail, no-one could understand his Scottish accent. This time, his investigating detective has it easier: DS Gillian Gish is Tottenham born and bred.
Although The Heights is billed as Rankin’s first standalone thriller in two decades, its plot and characters are lifted from his 2023 story The Rise, which is either, depending on your definition, a long short story or a short novella. Both begin briskly in the aftermath of the murder of a night concierge at a luxury residential tower overlooking Hyde Park. The main difference between the two is that in The Heights it has gained an extra six storeys.
Either way, the advantage of such a setting to a crime writer is obvious. Provided there’s a decent closed circuit security system, a luxury tower block can play the same role as a luxury steamer or a luxury train in an Agatha Christie novel. Earlier this year, Abir Mukherjee’s Delhi-set The Pinnacle was yet another demonstration of how a posse of plutocrats can be effectively corralled together in an opulent high-rise (though at 70 storeys it reaches far higher than either of Rankin’s).
Of the two plots, Rankin’s is the more complex. Whereas The Pinnacle was about an innocent man trying to prove he wasn’t involved in the murder of a Bollywood star beloved by a whole sub-continent, Rankin has to provide motives for murder that might be plausible for most of his building’s occupants. As £15 million will only get you one of the smaller flats in The Heights (or “suites” as the police are constantly reminded to call them), these include a cross-section of London’s wealthy elite: a record producer, his latest squeaky-clean male star, an actress, a gangster’s wife, an art dealer, a Covid profiteer, a mysterious Zimbabwean exile and a Russian who specialises in helping oligarchs avoid sanctions.
And if the list of suspects is large, so too are the numbers of those trying to find out the concierge’s murderer - including everyone separately trying to track down the gangster whose wife has just given a party in The Heights that ended in violence. There is also an oddball protestor who never forgave the building for replacing a community centre to which his mother had given her life, and an investigative journalist in search of a scoop, while the fans and showbiz hacks who congregate outside also want to find out whodunnit. As one of the journalists says: “There are enough stories here to keep us fed and watered all year.”
The police investigation is large, under pressure but also pressuring. Here we are reminded how well versed Rankin is in the art of the police procedural, how even though Rebus is a maverick, he is always part - however reluctantly - of a bureaucratic machine. With DS Gish we see this quite clearly: when she arrives on the murder scene, she is not in charge of it, instead working close but in a secondary role with a well-respected detective only three months away from retirement.
Gish is the only police character whom we see away from her work (like Rankin’s Malcolm Fox, she has a parent who suffers from dementia). Although we are told that she has “an occasional streak of recklessness”, we don’t see many signs of it early on, and she only starts to dominate the narrative at its conclusion. Until then, she plays everything by the book, and isn’t even central to some of the breakthroughs.
The end, I must admit, is ingenious, and the many narrative cogs turn neatly to unlock the sudden denouement. The writing is as confident, propulsive and informed as one would expect from Rankin, and in the extra space he has given himself, he leads us down a convincingly realistic number of blind alleys. Ultimately, though, there are just too many characters for the plot’s own good: fine if you read the novel in one go. If you can’t, you might struggle to scale The Heights.
The Heights, by Ian Rankin, Orion, £25
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