There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. “Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. Rebus, putting in very long hours, mulls over the case as he straggles home each night from the station, wondering where the killer might be hiding: The police are working around the clock to catch the killer before he strikes again. But he has more unusual eccentricities as well: he has occasional bouts of kleptomania flashbacks to his SAS training that can cause outbreaks of tears or even misdirected violent behavior and an obsession with Christian guilt and the possibility of redemption.Īs the story begins, someone is strangling little girls about Samantha’s age. To start with, he smokes and drinks to excess and tends to flout authority, but those traits are almost de rigueur these days for detectives in novels. Rebus’s character is flawed in most interesting ways. He sees his eleven-year-old daughter Samantha periodically, but interaction with her is awkward in part, it is because she is a teenaged girl with very different interests than his own, and in part, it is because he is a loner, and a troubled man. It has haunted his life however, and probably contributed to the break-up of his marriage. Formerly, he was one of the elite Special Air Service (a special forces regiment of the British Army) – a sort of Delta Force – but left after some kind of nervous breakdown, the circumstances surrounding which he has repressed.

John Rebus is a 41-year-old Detective Sergeant of the Great London Road police station in Edinburgh, Scotland. And how can you not feel favorably disposed toward a book with the epigraph “To Miranda, without whom nothing is worth finishing.” (The series begins with Knots & Crosses published in 1987, and ends with Exit Music published in 2007.) I’m so glad I read this first book it’s very good, and gives a lot of background on Rebus that one might be glad to have later on in the series.

Knots and Crosses is Book One of the Inspector Rebus series.

I ordered this book from the library because I had won a couple of Ian Rankin books featuring Inspector Rebus, but I do have an obsessive need to start at the beginning of a series. There are some mysteries you read because they are the only things available in the airport gift shop and you are desperate then there are those that rise above the designation of “airplane book” and are more aptly considered “crime novels.” Ian Rankin’s books fall into the latter category.

Knots and crosses rebus