OUT OF THE DARK

Will DCI Christine Caplan ever get back to investigating major incidents in Glasgow? Not if the criminals who throng the outlying areas have anything to say about it.

Because she’s in the neighborhood, Caplan is called to a house in Balloch whose two residents, longtime domestic partners, are both dead. The initial theory that the deaths were a murder-suicide gets more complicated when the pathologist indicates that chiropodist Roderick Taylor, who’d been given a terminal diagnosis, died at least two days before financial adviser Peter Todd, who was found hanged inside their home. For better or worse, Caplan’s soon distracted by a more urgent case: the disappearance of Bethany Robertson, who was burnishing her college applications by volunteering at the charity house Revolve Center, shortly after she left the place in the company of Shivonne McDougall, a hard-luck resident she’d befriended. Bethany’s widowed father, William, who’s so afraid that he’ll lose her as he did his wife that he secretly snaps pictures of her leaving every day, appeals to his friend Rory Ghillies, a retired detective chief constable who turns out to be no help at all. More promising, though more frustratingly cryptic, are the few words Rachel Ghillies, the wife he’s placed in hospice, manages to utter to Caplan, her classmate in police college: a plea to search for someone who might or might not be named Nicholas Straightman. Caplan’s determination to track down this mysterious person plunges her into an unnerving series of kidnappings whose latest victim may well be Bethany Robertson. In a setting like this, Todd and Rod will have to fight for attention.

Just when you think things can’t get any more sordid, Ramsay relentlessly drops you into an even lower level.