As part of the 2024 Farsley Literature Festival we are proud to announce, an afternoon at the Old Woollen with award winning author Sir Ian Rankin as he introduces us to the brand new John Rebus thriller ‘Midnight and Blue’, which will be released in October.

They say there is nowhere more dangerous for a cop than prison. John Rebus is about to find out just how true that is.

John Rebus’s appeal is stalled and his lawyers have stopped calling, as he hopes for the best but fears the worst. As the days bleed into each other, and the nights stretch before him, even the legendary detective struggles to keep his head. That is, until a murder in a locked cell presents a new mystery. They say old habits die hard. Everyone else is about to find out just how true that is too. On the outside, Siobhan Clarke investigates the disappearance of a girl who never came from school. Jasmine Andrews’ friends swear they haven’t seen her, and she hasn’t contacted them. But something about this case doesn’t add up. Is Jasmine, missing or on the run? Is she in danger, or is this something stranger?

Back inside, as new friends and old enemies begin to circle, Rebus finds himself at the centre of a case where the prisoners and the guards could all be suspects. But how do you find a killer in a place full of them?

Midnight and Blue is a masterfully executed twin-engine crime novel that combines Rankin’s gold standard Edinburgh-based police procedurals and a tough, tightly wound locked cell mystery. Rankin’s work is known for its integrity and ambition, as well as the topical socio-political commentary, and Midnight and Blue continues the series with a sense of a generational changing of the guards, the march of technology and its potential to be saviour and predator, the pressure on public institutions through budget cuts and a decaying sense of civic duty. It’s a story about groups and institutions – boys’ clubs and girl groups, schools and prisons, gangs and territory, power and control.