The Impossible Dead Book Cover

Ian Rankin's The Impossible Dead is a detective novel in which a seemingly straightforward internal affairs case leads to questions about the death of a rising politician twenty-five years earlier. My cover reflects the nature of the investigation, in which old newspaper clippings and photographs are the starting point for investigator Malcolm Fox to piece together the truth. Obscuring the faces in particular refers to Fox’s uncertainty about the identities of some of the actors he comes across in his research.

I designed this cover as a personal exercise and later sold and adapted it for Thomas Meins’ Der Tag verdient den Tod.