A pleasingly honest downbeat denouement is mitigated by a romantic upturn in the inspector's private life." - The Times Ours is not to ask questions, you know that.’ The man who spoke was the oldest of the three, and the only Calvinist. He opened the car boot. Inside, the body of a frail teenager lay crumpled, obviously dead. His skin was the colour of pencil shading, darkest where the bruises lay.

He was shrieking now, frantic, his face drained of all colour. She was at the top of the stairs, and he stumbled towards her, grabbing her by the arms, propelling her downstairs with unfocussed force, so that she feared they would both fall. She cried out. He stared at her, his eyes seeming almost to recognise her. Then he looked away again, into a distance all of his own. The word was a snakelike hiss. In this second book in the 'Inspector John Rebus' series, the Edinburgh police detective investigates a murder that has reverberations among the city's power elite. The book can be read as a standalone. The deceased's girlfriend, Tracy, calls the police and gets in touch with Rebus, warily trying to help, concerned also for her own safety, all the while as much trouble as she is help.As a lover of British crime thrillers, I try to read all the big names. I would like to be able to say I have read most of the big ones, yet the reality is that I have read nowhere near as many as I would like to be able to claim. I’ve been trying to amend that, and my journey into Ian Rankin is an example of me trying to better myself when it comes to one of my favourite genres. In the meantime, Superintendent Watson, Rebus' boss, wants Rebus to take on the job of being the police liaison with public officials in running a new anti-drugs campaign. Rebus is not happy with this assignment, especially since it has fallen to him because of his drug-addicted brother, now in prison ( ). However, it seems this assignment is going to lead to meeting the uppercrust of Edinburgh business, as well as membership in a restricted men's club! I have a big complaint about Ian Rankin’s early Rebus novels, and it is a complaint that continues to taint my enjoyment of the series. D.I. John Rebus is too erudite. He’s impossibly well read, he knows and loves fine wine, and he’s a big jazz fan; he’s way too cultured to be a D.I..

Rebus takes seriously a death which looks more like a murder every day, and he begins to investigate the true circumstances of the death. As part of his investigation, Rebus finds the young woman named Tracy who knew the dead man and heard his terrifying last words: "Hide! Hide!" It's a fairly clever resolution, though the show-down scene looks at first to be something of a Keystone Cops routine before then turning into the overly-dramatic confrontation scene that Rankin so often insists upon (and so rarely does really convincingly). Rian stared at the kitchen, counting the used pots, the half-eaten lobster carcasses, the wine glasses smudged with grease.John Rebus is a man on the way up in the Edinburgh police. He has been recently promoted to Detective Inspector from detective sergeant, of which he is justifiably proud. He has more authority and a new partner, Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes.

Rebus enlists Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes -- "Someone who didn't know Rebus well enough to complain about being kept in the dark, about being used as a shunting engine" -- to help him out, and though there is some friction between the two they make a decent team. Spoiler alert and trigger warning all in one: This review will be about the very disturbing topic of the international sex trade, which is what the book I am reviewing, Ian Rankin’s “Hide and Seek” is about.Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh. Too impatient, unwilling to really flesh Rebus out, Rankin offers another practise run with Hide and Seek, as he tries to figure the character out. Edinburgh provides the setting for this elegant and intelligent thriller. (...) The story is neatly adorned with puns and allusions to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde." - Sunday Times The conversation returned to how busy Edinburgh seemed these days. Here was something with which Rebus could agree. This being the end of May, the tourists were almost in season. But there was more to it than that. If anyone had told him five years ago that in 1989 people would be emigrating north from the south of England to the Lothians, he’d have laughed out loud. Now it was fact, and a fit topic for the dinner table. After reading the first book in the series, Knots and Crosses, I felt the ending was open ended and that I needed to read this second book. The books are so dissimilar that I’m a bit at a loss. The John Rebus from the first book was suffering from memories of the war, and in this book there’s very few mentions of the war and none of what haunted him. It’s almost as if this is a new character entirely.