The books under review could be subtitled a tale of two cities, London, and Oxford, writes COLIN STEELE. 

Ian Rankin’s new novel, set a world away from his gritty Edinburgh Rebus novels, has its origins in Rankin’s Amazon novella/audiobook, The Rise, published in 2023, which Rankin now expands into his first standalone novel for 20 years.

Rankin has said the length of the The Heights (Orion, $34.95) gave him much more narrative space to develop the characters of the millionaires living in a luxury high-rise apartment block overlooking London’s Hyde Park.

These include the shady developer of the high-rise building, a Russian oligarch, a major art dealer, a pop star, the wife of a major London gangster, a young woman who has Mozambique diplomatic protection, a Chinese crypto businessman and a reality TV actress. A heady mix!

When the young male concierge is found murdered in the high-rise lobby and another body is discovered in the boot of the Russian oligarch’s Bentley, everyone becomes a suspect in Rankin’s variation of the closed country house mystery.

The apartment owners are not used to being questioned, with several protected by bodyguards, high-income lawyers or under surveillance from the National Crime authority and the National Security Agency,

Rankin’s main investigating detectives, DS Gillian Gish and near retirement DCI Jack Milton, are sadly not John Rebus and Siobhan Clarke, but who could be? 

Crime fiction detectives are often tortured characters and Rankin’s Gish has to confront male prejudice and living in the living room of a terraced house with a mother with dementia, but Rankin infuses Gish with enough character and investigative curiosity to unlock a multifaceted murder mystery that another novel featuring Gish could be on the books.

OXFORD is almost a character in Susie Dent’s Death Writ Large (Zaffre, $34.95), the second in her Clarendon Lexicographer series. The first, Guilty by Definition, became the bestselling hardback crime fiction debut in Britain of 2025.

Death Writ Large, has the same trio of characters, Martha, Alex and Safi, researching at Dent’s former workplace, the Oxford University Clarendon English Dictionary.

Dent has said: “I put my heart and soul into Martha, but age-wise, I’m much closer to Alex – she’s sassy and savvy. Safi is insatiably curious. And Martha lives in her head – entirely like me. It really appealed to me to have three women at very different stages, yet who have this bond”.

The novel begins as a university lecturer is found dead, having apparently ended his life by suicide after jumping off an Oxford church tower. Runes are found on the church tower steps and subsequently around Oxford, which leads to the lexicographers being consulted once more by DI Oliver Caldwell, for whom Martha still has feelings.

Martha recognises the symbols as being from an alphabet created by a dead author on whose papers she worked. It slowly emerges that someone is targeting a small group of former Oxford students who call themselves the Cabal, but what act did they commit on graduation that has caused someone to seek murderous revenge on them?

Dent has produced another clever mystery, which also allows readers to try and work out the runes alongside the Clarendon trio. Oxford aficionados, in withdrawal after Inspector Morse, will appreciate lots of familiar Oxford locations

RUNES were an academic speciality of JRR Tolkien but “ruins” is a more appropriate word for the setting of Tolkien’s The Bovadium Fragments (HarperCollins, $39.99), which is the last major Tolkien manuscript to be edited for publication by his late son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, who notes in his introduction that the book is a “satirical fantasy” completed by his father for his own amusement around 1960.

One of the major themes underpinning The Lord of the Rings trilogy was Tolkien’s distaste for the modern industrial world. As Tolkien once put it, “the spirit of ‘Isengard’, if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up  in the modern world”.

Tolkien describes, in a story told in adjoined Latin and English page sections, the demise of the citizens of Oxford as recounted from the future by a group of archaeologists excavating the remnants of Bovadium , aka Oxford.

The population of Oxford died from the poisonous fumes of “Motores” aka “monsters”, manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum, a reference to Lord Nuffield and his huge Cowley car manufacturing plant.

What Tolkien would have made of contemporary Big Tech “machine worshippers” would have been interesting, while issues around Oxford’s traffic problems continue in the present.

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