Malcolm Fox

About the Malcolm Fox series

Malcolm Fox is a detective sergeant in the Complaints and Conduct department -- Police Scotland's internal-affairs unit, the officers other officers hate to see walk into a room. A recovering alcoholic and estranged from the drinking culture of ordinary CID work, Fox investigates his own colleagues for corruption, brutality and cover-ups, which makes him a natural foil for the boozy, rule-breaking style of detective embodied elsewhere in Ian Rankin's fiction. Rankin created Fox in 2009, midway through a five-year break from writing Inspector Rebus, partly as an experiment in building a completely different kind of Edinburgh cop: methodical, abstemious, and reluctantly good at a job everyone else on the force resents him for doing.

The Complaints (2009) opens with Fox pulled into investigating a fellow officer over child-pornography allegations that spiral into a property-fraud conspiracy tangled up with the 2008 financial crash. The Impossible Dead (2011) sends him to Fife to look into a colleague's misconduct and uncovers a decades-old cold case rooted in 1980s Scottish nationalist politics. Both novels are self-contained procedurals built around institutional rot rather than a single villain, with Fox's outsider status -- disliked by nearly everyone he investigates -- doing most of the character work.

Rankin never wrote a third headline Fox novel. Instead, starting with Standing in Another Man's Grave (2012), Fox was folded into the Rebus series itself as a recurring supporting character -- sometimes ally, sometimes obstacle -- as Rebus, forced into retirement, keeps working cases from the outside. Fox's own two-book run stands as a complete, self-contained arc for readers who want the character on his own terms before he becomes a fixture of Rebus's world.

How to read this series

Read The Complaints (2009) then The Impossible Dead (2011) -- Fox's rank, his family situation and the fallout from his first case carry forward directly into the second book. No prior knowledge of Rebus is needed; these two novels work as a self-contained duology.

Afterwards, Fox reappears as a supporting character across several Inspector Rebus novels starting with Standing in Another Man's Grave (2012) -- tracked separately in this guide's Inspector Rebus series -- so readers who want the character's full arc should continue there rather than expecting further standalone Fox novels.