This is Rankin, so it's only to be expected that the plotting should be tight, the dialogue quick-fire, the crimes disturbingly believable, taking place as they do in a world that is so thoroughly and obviously our own, today. What the creator of Rebus also gives us in Fox – initially in the inspector's first outing, The Complaints, and again here – is another complex, driven policeman: difficult, largely miserable and lonely, but utterly real.