Intricate legal thrillers might be his area of expertise, but American best-selling author John Grisham doesn’t shy away from a classic family mystery crime series.
Back in 2020, the writer – who was written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers and sold 300 million copies worldwide – shared with Goodreads his all-time favourite thrillers, giving readers a peek into the works that inspire him – or just the ones he enjoys in his time off.
Listed among books about real cases, social justice tales and detective novellas set in foreign countries, is Grisham’s favourite: A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin.
With a title rooted in real-world issues – “dark times” was meant to refer to the era of Brexit and autocratic leaders back in 2019, but also reflected the Covid-19 lockdown period when the book was published in 2020 -, the novel is the 23rd instalment of Rankin’s Inspector Rebus fictional series that follows the detective and his cases in and around Edinburgh.
In the 2020 book, John Rebus gets a call from his daughter Samantha in the dead of night, and is told her husband has been missing for two days.
Then, Rebus navigates the disappearance and the subsequent investigation, knowing his daughter would be considered by police to be the prime suspect.
“He wasn’t the best father – the job always came first – but now his daughter needs him more than ever. But is he going as a father or a detective?”, reads the official synopsis.
Faced with this moral dilemma, Rebus finds himself wondering whether this might be “the first time in his life where the truth is the one thing he doesn’t want to find…”
Ian Rankin’s A Song for the Dark Times is graded with 4.13 stars on reviewing platform Goodreads, and has amassed over 19 thousand ratings.
Media reviews were divided between considering it a mere filler to the Inspector Rebus series and praising its style – with a Times review lauding it as “perfect for our dark times”, and saying: “only great novels capture the spirit of the age. This is one of them.”
Placing the book in the top position of his list, Grisham described: “John Rebus, the hero in many of Ian’s books, is getting old and even crankier. He’s trying to give up booze and cigarettes, but he can’t stay out of trouble”.
“The partner of his daughter, Samantha, goes missing, and of course Rebus is soon up to his ears in solving the crime”, he added.
Filling the second and third places in John Grisham’s ranking are In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena by Ron Rash – a collection of ten stories – and Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson – which he mentioned having read three times at the time of reviewing.