Ian Rankin's new novel, The Heights, is set in a Knightsbridge apartment block where the concierge turns up dead and the residents assume the whole thing will quietly go away. They are wrong. DS Gillian Gish, Rankin's brand-new lead, is embedded in Tottenham and carries that neighbourhood's gravitational pull into every room she enters. The ultra-rich have nowhere to hide their art, their alibis, or their contempt. Rankin is direct about what he's doing. His crime fiction is political or it is nothing. The Heights isn't a cosy whodunit with a luxury backdrop — it is, by the author's own framing, a story about how extreme wealth distorts privacy, accountability, and the basic social contract. The Chapman Brothers artworks in the marble entrance hall are a detail that works as shorthand: money that has escaped taste, comfort that has curdled into performance. The Columbo comparison Rankin offers isn't decorative. Peter Falk's detective was a class weapon disguised as a rumpled annoyance, and Gish is built on the same chassis — someone who enjoys disturbing the cosseted world precisely because she comes from outside it. Where Rebus is a loner eroding institutions from within, Gish is a carer, rooted, with a mother to go home to and a neighbourhood that knows her name. That rootedness is the structural difference between the two detectives, and it gives The Heights a social texture the Edinburgh books had to work harder to achieve. Rankin has spent 26 Rebus novels mapping one city's class fault-lines, corruption, and institutional rot. Moving to London is not a holiday — it's a larger canvas with steeper stakes. He admits Edinburgh couldn't have held this story: 'You're not going to see a Rolls-Royce or a Bugatti Veyron. The wealth here is discreet.' London's ultra-rich are not discreet, which is precisely why a detective like Gish can get purchase on them. The biographical detail worth noting is how Rankin lives in relation to the money his success has generated. Thirty to forty percent of his net income goes annually into a charitable trust he and his wife Miranda run, focused on smaller charities serving people with special needs — including their younger son Kit, who has Angelman syndrome. The man writing about the moral obscenity of hoarded wealth gives away a third of his earnings. That's not a press-release detail; it's the source of the political conviction underneath the fiction. Rebus, meanwhile, is in prison but not without hope — his lawyer has 'very good news.' Rankin is close-lipped about what comes next, but the door is clearly open. For now, Gish is the new instrument, and The Heights is the first test of her range.
