There aren’t too many characters here but probably a few too many coincidences – well, how else do you make a mystery work when you have a city of ten million people and just a couple of hundred pages to work with? But, as always, the beauty here is in the banter and the observation of our hero in action. And the meeting with the daughter’s boyfriend is a classic of it’s ilk. Snide comments and hurtful one-liners abound. The comedy, of course, comes in the bone-dry form. Throw in the fact that his ex-wife and daughter now live in London (the daughter with a boyfriend Rebus detests on sight) and you have a delicious concoction that you just know will be hilariously entertaining. It’s really interesting to see Rebus out of his comfort zone, mixing with cockney coppers who seem to resent his presence and stumbling around a city he has no real knowledge of. Why has Rebus been asked to go down south and help? Ok, he’d played a part in arresting a multiple murderer back in his own patch, but it wasn’t really the work of a serial killer. Who is killing women in the capital – stabbing them and leaving bite marks on the body?Ģ. So, my favourite Scottish sleuth has been called down to London to help track down a serial killer. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, and opted to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.Ī contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, on Channel 4 in 2002. 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 has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987 the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents. 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.

Tooth and Nail by Ian Rankin