Black and Blue

It opens with everything at once. Rebus is chasing a serial killer known as The Preacher, whose murders of young women are being repeated by a copycat dubbed The Disciple. Same method, same ugly signature, and the question hanging over the first act is whether the original has returned or another man has simply learned his lessons. Then Rebus gets pulled off the case and handed a death that looks like a straightforward accident.

That death refuses to stay simple, and neither does anything else. But the trail runs from Leith and Edinburgh out towards Glasgow and Aberdeen, and every stop adds more: suicides that were not suicides, drug dealing, money laundering, dirty cops exposed, and a couple of suspects whose private arrangements complicate the picture. Rebus carries the lot with the weary patience of a man who has seen Edinburgh's worst side too often to flinch at it.

Jim Norton plays the Preacher, Ryan Slocum, and the cast around him is strong. Ewan Stewart is DI Morton, Sara Stewart is DCI Gill Templer, Joanna Roth is Eve Kendal and Stuart Hepburn, who co-wrote the script with Ian Rankin, also plays D Supt McCaskill. Gayanne Potter's Siobhan Clarke, Clare McCarron's Angie Riddell, David Lyon's Lawson Geddes and Robert McIntosh's Lenny Spaven fill out the ranks. Martyn Friend directed.

It is a huge amount of story for a first episode, and it knows it. The pleasure is in watching Rebus hold the threads together while the rest of Edinburgh tries to pull them apart. He gets the tangles sorted in the end, and the copycat question does get an answer. It is not a comfortable one.

Hannah makes Rebus weary without making him boring, which is the hard part of the job. The episode's ambition is the point: a city full of crimes, and one detective expected to make sense of it all before the next body turns up. He manages it, just about.