And then a fragment of Scotland’s criminal history is repatriated at the end of a life sentence for murder. Rebus' actions in the opening pages cast enough of a shadow on him that his very brief involvement on another case is used by the defense to cast a shadow on the police's investigation. The story he gets is sheer rubbish, since Oakes is an arch-manipulator who is using Stevens as a smokescreen. When Rebus discovers that Rough has been assigned an apartment with a view of a children's playground, he "outs" Rough to the other tenants with disastrous consequences.

At the outset, Rebus, who's been drinking too much, endures frequent visitations from his recently deceased comrade-in-arms, Jack Morton, and suffers helplessly as his daughter struggles to recover from a hit-and-run accident that's left her paralyzed. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Despite the novels being set in totally different countries, for me it is quite easy to view John Rebus in much the same light as Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch". Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature.

He thought back to times when he'd been happy, realising that at the time he hadn't felt happy; it was only in retrospect that it dawned on him. Letting the neighbours know who the new man is in one of Edinburgh's rougher council estates is enough to pretty much ruin Rough's life -- but that turns out not be quite as satisfying as Rebus had hoped. I found myself holding my breath at times for Rebus, who despite being irascible and rough around the edges, is a decent human being and a good detective. You just know that somewhere along the way all these disparate stories are going to intersect and the result will probably not be pretty.

His experience with both Rough and Oakes makes Rebus think out his prejudices and question how much a person is the product of his inherited nature, and how much nurture shapes that character.

Well, it's not a series with a sunny outlook, by any means, and Inspector Rebus is not an altogether sympathetic central character. I don't think I won any kind of genetic lottery; I just know my parents and the way they tried to raise my brother and me. Dead Souls was written in 1999 and depicts a John Rebus who is increasingly feeling dead inside and wondering if he should continue as a police officer. While, as is his habit, he deploys a complex plot made of apparently unrelated elements, and in doing so binds the highest in the land to the poorest in their feral pursuit of gold and gratification, at some points the book lacks the element of menace which has given several of its predecessors their addictive appeal. When the social workers claim he is there for legitimate educational reasons, Rebus is faced with a dilemma - should he be outed to protect local kids or given a chance to start anew?

This is a well-crafted thriller with three parallel lines of plotting, a bit dated by some of the hot-button social issues of the late nineties. Dead Souls by Ian Rankin was the winner of the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 2005, six years after it was published in the U.But somehow Rankin keeps all the plates spinning, even while he attempts to explore larger issues of morality. Rebus's troubles are soon reflected in the old city around him: violent grassroots vigilantism breaks out in a housing project when Rebus informs the press that a convicted child molester is living in one of the flats; Cary Oakes, a serial killer just released from a U. I don't know that this is a bad one to be your first Rebus novel -- you may be willing to cut him more slack for his questionable actions if you've got a history with him than you would be otherwise, however. As for thought, Rebus thinks a lot and usually gets to the answer to his problems in the end, but he is also known to act hastily and without much thought at times. Rebus, while following Rough, observes him taking pictures of the animals or is the children at a zoo.