I would have to add that Rankin does a great job of portraying a man like Rebus, and good characterization certainly has appeal.

He gets away with it in the storyline because he almost always solves his cases, and as far as his appeal to readers, I have read that it seems to be based on sympathy with his instinctive negative reaction to authority and obsequiousness. He selfishly uses the few people he accepts as friends, and pushes away all others. At his retirement party, Siobhan gives Rebus an iPod loaded with music – “exit music” – but Rebus can’t let go, and when he does, at the end, it’s literally by kicking and screaming.Įvaluation: Rebus isn’t the most likeable detective: he’s nasty, cheap, a know-it-all, and usually drunk or on his way to being so. He muses a lot on the way the city seems to be run by a combination of the underworld and the “overworld” (rich movers and shakers, “with their games of golf and their ‘quiet words,’ their stitch-ups and handshakes, palm-greasing and scratching of backs”). He can’t imagine what his life will be without it. He wonders what he will do: the force has been his life for three decades. Rebus has spent most of his career trying to rein in Big Ger, and he senses the possibility that now, at the eleventh hour, he’ll get his chance.ĭiscussion: The prospect of retirement doesn’t go down easily for Rebus.

Moreover, somehow Morris Gerald “Big Ger” Cafferty, a notorious Edinburgh crime boss and Rebus’s nemesis, is also involved. It begins to appear that the murder of the Russian poet at the book’s outset is related to the presence of prosperious Russian big-wigs in the city who have ties to Scottish nationalists in Parliament and to rich bankers in Edinburgh. His young colleague Siobhan Clarke will miss his insights when he retires, but not his irascibility or incorrigibly provocative behavior. At age sixty, he is the longest-serving officer in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), and manages to accomplish quite a bit in spite of spending a great deal of time drinking. This 17th book in the series begins with a murder committed just ten days before the mandatory retirement of Edinburgh, Scotland Inspector John Rebus, after thirty-some years on the force. While I enjoyed reading this episode of the Inspector Rebus books, I can’t say I’d see any reason for anyone to read it who has not been following the series, unless you’re into crabby, alcoholic, detectives who always solve the crime in spite of their self-sabotaging habits.

Exit music by ian rankin