Dead Souls

 Dead Souls is dark, even for Ian Rankin, with several plots which connect in unexpected ways. It begins with a policeman's suicide and quickly moves on to Rebus's botched attempt to catch someone who's been poisoning animals at the zoo. Botched because Rebus sees a released sex offender and chases after him. His unauthorized investigation into the parolee leads him to an old case involving sexual abuse at a reformatory, which may or may not involve a murderer returned from Montana where he's been released on a technicality. And in his spare time, Rebus is investigating the disappearance of his high school girlfriend's 20-something son and worrying about his daughter, still unable to walk after the accident in The Hanging Garden. It's a lot, and as usual Rankin doesn't give anyone an unqualified happy ending, but it's also interesting, believable, and well written. Just not something to read in January when we need a bit of a lift.

The Hanging Garden

 There's a new crime lord in Edinburgh, and due to a sex trafficked Bosnian girl who develops a rapport with John Rebus, the Inspector ends up in the middle of it. Tommy Telford believes that Rebus is Big Ger Cafferty's man and while the DI has contacts in the imprisoned gangster's organization, he's a cop first and foremost.

He's also prone to over-involvement in his cases. So when Candace seems to bond with him during her arrest, he takes on her case although he's been tasked with determining whether a retired professor is actually a Nazi war criminal. Rankin ties the turf war and the war crime together in a surprising way and still manages to work in a family crisis without making it feel grafted on. Like all the Rebus novels, it's dark and probably not the best choice for dreary days but it's thoroughly engrossing.

Black and Blue

I'm not sure how I feel about Black and Blue. Ian Rankin's 8th mystery featuring John Rebus was a very good novel, but the mystery didn't quite work. Exiled to a particularly downtrodden Edinburgh police station, Rebus gets assigned to the murder of an oil worker. Somehow, this connects to environmental protesters, drug dealing in Aberdeen, and an old case (one of Rebus's first) which has resurfaced, putting Rebus under investigation (again). I never managed to tie the threads together, but I enjoyed my time with John Rebus, depressed - and to be honest, depressing - as he is.

Let It Bleed

Let It Bleed starts with a car chase out of a Hollywood action movie, a chase that ends with John Rebus's boss in the hospital and the men they were chasing diving off an icy bridge onto the deck of a police boat (as the coroner says, at least it saved the department the case of a water search).  Don't worry, after that Ian Rankin returns to his familiar ground, political and police corruption against the backdrop of Edinburgh's dreary weather.  A few days after the chase, crash, and suicide, Rebus is called out to investigate the suicide of a recently released, terminally ill prisoner who chose a local councillor's open hours as his place of death.  Rebus thinks they're connected, and finding himself on an involuntary vacation tells him he's right.  The plot was a bit convoluted, involving tech start-ups (the book was written nearly 20 years ago, and there's a prescient scene where Rebus's drinking buddy claims that eventually we'll all have pocket sized computers) and sham contracts for retraining unemployed workers.  Rankin sufficiently supported his conclusion, but I liked the book more for Rebus than for the plot.

Mortal Causes

The recent Brexit vote may affect the tenuous peace in Northern Ireland.  The country not only voted to stay in the EU (along with Scotland), but it's been propped up by help from the central EU government.  Will 20 years of uneasy discomfort dissolve into renewed violence if/when the economy of Northern Ireland falls without support from Brussels?

Mortal Causes takes place during the final months of escalating violence before the Good Friday Agreement.  Reading a 20-year-old mystery is a bit like stepping into a time machine.  I was an adult, and in law school, when Inspector John Rebus first sees the body, strung up and shot in an underground rehab site.  Billy Cunningham appears to be an IRA victim, but something doesn't seem right to Rebus - is it possible that Cunningham's murder was an attempt to frame the IRA or the act of a splinter group?  Complicating matters, Cunningham just happened to be Big Ger Coffey's son and prison can't stop the gangster from threatening Rebus if he doesn't solve his son's murder.  Rankin's mystery is complex, and I don't want to spoil the mystery for future readers.  Suffice to say that Rankin easily and non-obviously ties the murder, increasing sectarian violence (Rebus lives in a world where religion, even if you're not religious, chooses which soccer team you root for), and council estate gangs into a satisfying mystery.

The Black Book

The Black Book succeeds as a novel but fails as a mystery.  I didn't find any of the interlocking mysteries (the attack on his DS Brian Holmes, the murder of the chef at Holmes's favorite Elvis-themed restaurant, and the cold case surrounding a hotel fire) Rebus solved particularly satisfactory.  I found Rebus's personal life (he's crashing on the sofa of his own apartment because his girlfriend has kicked him out and he's sublet the apartment to students; then his estranged brother appears looking for a place to stay) to be more coherently plotted.  Despite its weaknesses, I enjoyed The Black Book, but I recommend it more as an installment in a series.  If you're reading books individually, you can probably skip this one.

Strip Jack

Inspector John Rebus may be congenitally incapable of happiness.  Either that, or he's incredibly unlucky.  His new relationship seems to be failing from the start, he's a pawn in the battle between his alcoholic boss and the man who wants to replace him, and he's dealing with three totally unrelated crimes (a politician named Gregor Jack caught in a prostitution sting, stolen rare books, and a homeless murder suspect who's disappeared).  Normally, I'd consider it too coincidental for these three threads to tie together, but Ian Rankin manages to combine them cleanly, and with a murder - that of Jack's wife.  As Rebus investigated her wealthy, fast-lane friends and Jack's "old gang," it becomes clear that Jack has been betrayed and doesn't know it.  The final scenes, with the murderer holding Jack hostage before being chased through a wooded area during a thunderstorm are a bit contrived, but somehow the book held together for me.

Tooth and Nail

If John Rebus has an iPhone, Siri is useless. Siri can't understand a Scottish accent and Rebus's accent and dialect serve as both a running gag and a stealth clue in Tooth and Nail, the only Rebus mystery to take place outside of Scotland. He's in London as a special consultant due to his alleged expertise with serial killers - alleged, because unbeknownst to the London police, the crime in Knots and Crosses wasn't actually a serial killing but a trap laid specifically for Rebus.

The Wolfman is killing women in London, brutalizing them after death, and then biting their abdomens. Rebus may not be an expert on serial killers, but he's a good detective and as an outsider, someone who can look at the case from a fresh angle. That angle includes listening to a psychologist who's researching serial killers, a flash of insight while wandering through an open air market, and another one while musing on the different English dialects. That turns out to be the key to the case, and leads to a car chase through central London with a judge along for the ride.

Rankin initially set out to write straight novels rather than mysteries (although if your first book involves a series of murders and your second high level corruption, you need to be fairly dense to not realize that you're a mystery writer), and while he seems to have come to terms with his genre status in Tooth and Nail, he does include a domestic subplot. Rebus's wife had moved to London with their daughter a few years earlier, and Sammy is now 16 and seeing a rising criminal. Rankin handles this better than most of the subplot-heavy mysteries I've read since starting this blog - it doesn't take up too much of the book or feel like an afterthought, and the links between the two are believable coincidences. Still, it's the least satisfying part of the book, mainly because Rhona is so faintly drawn and Sammy seems less fully fleshed than she did five years earlier in Knots and Crosses. But maybe that's the point - Rebus is a stranger in London and what drives that home more than finding out that he's a stranger to his daughter?

Hide and Seek

A year or so after the events of Knots and Crosses, Edinburgh is booming. It's the late 80s and London transplants are conspicuously consuming. Rebus wants nothing to do with that (it's not in his nature, and he'd rather just solve the murder of a junkie found oddly posed in a squat), but a lunch devised to organize an anti-drug task force brings Rebus into contact with the top level of Edinburgh business society. When one of his dining companions commits suicide a few days later, and the murder victim's girlfriend mentions hidden photographs, Rebus suspects that the two deaths may be connected. He's right, and Hide and Seek is a compelling mystery with plenty of twists, red herrings, and dead ends. Eventually, Rebus solved the mystery (ahead of me - which is fairly rare) although justice is not served. For the most part, Hide and Seek lives up to the standards set by the first Rebus novel, but it does rely a bit too much on coincidence, especially in the final segment of the story.

Knots and Crosses

Ian Rankin didn't set out to write mystery novels.  How he could have thought that he would not have been listed as a 'mystery novelist' when his first book focused on a police detective hunting a serial killer is even more of a mystery than the plot of Knots and Crosses, but it doesn't detract from this compelling psychological novel.  

We first see John Rebus at his father's grave, and that sets the tone for Knots and Crosses.  Rebus is chronically depressed and psychologically scarred by his military service.  He's recently divorced, on uncertain terms with his brother (a stage hypnotist), not well liked by his colleagues, and he lives in a very grey version of Edinburgh.  There's a serial killer stalking pre-teen girls, and Rankin alternates between the investigation in which Rebus is involved and scenes featuring his 12-year-old daughter, Samantha.  

Knots and Crosses is a well-written, tightly plotted mystery, and I didn't guess the killer until a few pages before the end.  What struck me, though, was how different the world was in 1987.  There are no cell phones, few computers, no internet...Samantha looks for a library book in a card catalog and the investigation involves shuffling paper instead of scrolling through screens.  There's even a brief passage discussing whether computers will ever replace legwork.  1987 is an almost foreign world, but I lived there - as a college student and a legal adult.  How odd will the world depicted in books published today feel in 2025?