The Hanging Garden

A pharmaceutical factory is the city's main source of cocaine, and two gangs are getting ready to fight over it. The upstart leader plans a gun battle inside the plant, and the attack lands right on top of Rebus's old friend and workmate DI Jack Morton, who is undercover there. Morton takes fatal wounds. It is the kind of loss that would break a quieter man.

There is no time to grieve. Candice, a young mother kidnapped from Bosnia and forced into prostitution, needs Rebus's help to see her son again, and his daughter Sammy, all of nineteen, offers her a place to stay. Days later Sammy is mown down by a hit-and-run driver and lies in a coma. Rebus is certain she was targeted because he has been protecting Candice and pushing to take down the two gangs. He and his ex-wife take turns at the hospital bed, and the case gains a father's urgency.

That bedside vigil is where the episode earns its keep. John Hannah gets to show Rebus as a man as well as a detective, and the softer side sits awkwardly on him, which is exactly right. The cast around him includes Ewan Stewart as Jack Morton, Sara Stewart as DCI Gill Templar, Lewis Howden as DI Ormond, Stuart Hepburn as Det. Supt. McCaskill and Gayanne Potter as DS Siobhan Clarke. Sheyla Shehovich plays Candice, Eilidh MacDonald plays Sammy, Tom Watson is Dr. Emir Slaven and James Cosmo turns up as Morris Cafferty. Ian Rankin wrote it with Ben Brown and Philip Palmer, and Maurice Phillips directed.

But the personal stuff never quite outweighs the job. The gun battle, the bombing, the trafficking and the white slavery all lead back to the same two gang leaders, and Rebus has to answer for both halves of his life at once.

It is grim, but it has a heart, and the heart is what stays with you.