Rankin being Rankin, there are a panoply of other features with which Rebus has to contend: a third case involving the missing adult son of two of Rebus' childhood friends; a fling with an old high school flame; thinly-veiled criticism of the 1% (fifteen years before it was popular); the fallout from his daughter's near-death experience in the previous book; the responsibility of the media not to turn killers into celebrities; and so on. 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. Knowing some answers does not really resolve the divisions and imperfections in society which it is the job of Rebus and his colleagues to police. He is, at his core, a deeply moral character, but he has lost much of his faith, along with many friends and family members, along the way. John Rebus comes out of retirement in Edgar-winner Rankin's stellar 20th novel featuring the Edinburgh cop (after 2013's Standing in Another Man's Grave).

His first Rebus novel was published in 1987; the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents. Patience is fleshed out a little more than usual here, usually she is the woman Rebus is hardly with, often choosing to spend solitary time at his own flat. He is also reliving his past after an old girlfriend asks him to investigate her missing son Damon’s disappearance. Dead Souls is a long book but the pages turned themselves and I was reluctant to stop reading at any point.It's really very impressive watching how Rankin weaves every strand of story and character in this novel -- it always is, but this web seems more intricate than usual. These are not "feel good" stories and the continuing characters in the series have weaknesses and secrets and the ghosts of the past are haunting them all. Rebus has certain prejudices and a certain impulsive nature that we can all associate with and which makes matters worse.

The subject matter of pedophiles and missing children is a hard one to deal with but when Rebus sends them away it makes it all better. Multiple stories, some relating to each other more than others, are introduced so piecemeal and jumping about in unrelated snippets; a multitude of characters, several with similar names difficult to differentiate; along with a sort of exaggerated Brit/Scot street slang all worked to make the first fifty pages almost unintelligible to me.Being drawn back to one's home town brings back a lot of nostalgia, but Rankin shows the bleakness facing those who have chosen to stay. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. Rebus is up to his usual behaviour, so determined to catch his criminal that he frequently comes very close to unprofessional behaviour. The souls that are dead here have been killed by various means and methods over time -- some realize that's what they are, some haven't a clue -- some come to realize it in these pages (and some try to revitalize themselves). 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.

The initial difficulties mentioned, especially the "hard" language (not just hard as in difficult but as in rough, not literarily well wrought or aesthetic) keeps my rating a four though. As with most of the books in this series, there are two cases that first seem unrelated but which eventually intertwine in ways that are compelling and inevitable, and in this case both of them touch on the question of how much a criminal's past is to blame for his present. For the best part of an hour, Rebus had been trying to blink away a hangover, which was about as much exercise as he could sustain.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.

Rebus finds himself on a treacherous precipice both professionally and personally, dealing not only with the death of a long-time friend and colleague, Jack Morton, but also disturbing cases both past and present.My feeling was that, for instance you might take a break to smoke a "ciggie" once or twice - but never refer to it as a cigarette? I think something's gone bad inside you", an acquaintance diagnoses early on, and for much of the book Rebus himself isn't so sure that she's wrong.