Ian Rankin's ninth book about Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh police is so full of story that it seems about to explode into shapeless anarchy at any moment. What keeps it from doing so is Rankin's strong heart and even stronger writing skills. When a Bosnian prostitute refuses to testify against a crime boss who has threatened her family, he says this about the cops trying to pressure her: "Silence in the room. They were all looking at her. Four men, men with jobs, family ties, men with lives of their own. In the scheme of things, they seldom realised how well off they were. And now they realised something else: how helpless they were."

Rebus is trying to help the young woman--renamed Candice by the young, slick, brutal thug Tommy Telford, who is into everything from drugs and prostitution to aiding a Japanese business syndicate in acquiring a local golf course--because she's about the same age and physical aspect as his own daughter, Sammy. He's also conducting the investigation of a suspected Nazi war criminal, an old man who spends his time tending graves in Warriston cemetery. "A cemetery should have been about death, but Warriston didn't feel that way to Rebus. Much of it resembled a rambling park into which some statuary had been dropped," Rankin writes with the icy clarity of cold water over stone.

Add to this Rebus's involvement with an imprisoned crime boss in a plan to bring Telford down; his continuing battle with drink; the strong possibility that people high up in the British government don't want the old Nazi exposed; danger to Sammy and her journalist lover because of her father's work; and a somewhat strained metaphor of Edinburgh as a new Babylon and you have an admittedly large pot of stew. But Rankin's high art keeps it all bubbling and rich with flavor. Others in the Rebus series include his 1997 Edgar Award-nominated Black and Blue, as well as Hide and Seek, Knots and Crosses, Let It Bleed, Mortal Causes, Strip Jack, and Tooth and Nail. --Dick Adler


From Publishers Weekly
This sprawling, overloaded mystery from a justly acclaimed and usually very reliable crime author is a disappointment. Through nine previous novels (Black and Blue, 1997, etc.), dogged Edinburgh copper John Rebus has been captivating company?a man willing to place career before family and known to find solace in the bottle as his personal life takes an inevitable pounding. In this latest, Rebus's woes are strictly secondary (even as his daughter Samantha lies in a coma after a hit and run) as unsuspecting Edinburgh is rapidly transformed into the crime capital of the Western world. New hoodlum Tommy Telford is taking over, running whores imported from Eastern Europe, conspiring with Japanese businessmen to buy golf courses and selling drugs from the back of an ice cream van. All this upsets Ger Rafferty, the reigning hoodlum, who's stuck in prison and friendly with Rebus. Rebus makes a deal with Ger to take Telford down. Rebus also gives shelter to a suicidal prostitute and investigates the life and times of Joseph Lintz, a retired academic and alleged Nazi war criminal. A supremely implausible piece of plotting links Lintz to Telford's crowd. The evolution of Scotland's capital city into a gangster-riddled Babylon is bold, but all the canny procedural detail that Rankin is known for is lamentably jettisoned for a train wreck of a novel that aims for cinematic epic mayhem but achieves only narrative chaos instead. Author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
John Rebus (Let It Bleed, LJ 12/96), an Edinburgh detective-inspector and father of a 24-year-old daughter, feels especially protective of a young Serbian woman coerced into prostitution by a local mobster. The woman's inability to communicate adds to the frustration of an unproductive, ongoing police surveillance and the continuation of crimes associated with the mobster. At the same time, Rebus investigates a local ex-Nazi's alleged role in a French war crime. This is a realistic police procedural with a human touch, including the old question of guilt-by-following-orders. An excellent choice for all collections.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Edinburgh police inspector John Rebus has become one of Britain's best fictional cops: iconoclastic, a confirmed rule-breaker, but utterly ferocious in his determination to get to the bottom of a case. Like John Harvey's Charlie Resnick, another top British cop, Rebus' personal life is usually in tatters: too much job, too little life, with small pleasures (jazz for Resnick, '60s rock for Rebus) filling in for relationships. When Rebus' adult daughter, his only solace on the personal front, is nearly killed in a suspicious hit-and-run incident, the copper's ferocity is ratcheted up a notch, with his ire directed at the objects of his two open investigations--a suspected Nazi war criminal and two rival crime lords. Nobody does grit like Rankin. The Rebus novels live on texture; the taste of cold coffee and the grinding edges of frayed nerves take on a visceral reality as the cops slog toward answers that only bring more questions. Against the unremitting grayness of this world, Rebus' beleaguered humanity shines in bold relief. Bill Ott


Book Description
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon... The hanging of four French villagers in World War II... The hanging of an old man in a Scottish cemetary... Seemingly random facts linked to one man...

Detective Inspector John Rebus is buried under a pile of paperwork generated by his investigations into a suspected war criminal, and his immediate supervisors are more than happy to have him tucked away in a quiet backwater for several months. However, the escalating dispute between upstart Tommy Telford and Big Ger Cafferty's gang soon gives Rebus an escape clause. Telford is known to have close ties to a man nicknamed Mr. Pink Eyes, a brutal gangster running a lucrative business bringing Chechen refugees into Britain to work as prostitutes. And when Rebus takes under his wing a distraught Bosnian call girl, it gives him a personal reason to make sure Telford takes the high road out of town. Within days, Rebus's daughter is the victim of an all-too-professional hit-and-run, and Rebus knows that there's nothing he won't do to bring down prime suspect Tommy Telford--even if it means cutting a deal with the devil.

A chilling glimpse into the darkest extremes of human cruelty, a page-turning literary thriller, this ninth entry in Ian Rankin's award-winning series confirms his reputation as a writer of rare and lasting gifts.



From the Publisher
Praise for Ian Rankin: "Ian Rankin is up there among the best crime novelists at work today. His stuff is always taut, gritty, and stirring. At the heart of it stands Rebus, a character for the ages because he's a cop with style, wit, and an inalienable sense of the gray area between right and wrong." --Michael Connelly "The progenitor--and king--of tartan noir." --James Ellroy "A novelist of great scope, depth, and power...Brilliant." --Jonathan Kellerman "In Rankin you cannot go wrong." --THE BOSTON GLOBE "Ian Rankin's brilliant series featuring John Rebus is the kind of blistering police procedural that gives the genre a good name." --ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY "A brilliant series...the work of a master." --THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER & CHRONICLE "Crime fiction at its best." --THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD "Rankin's dexterity in juggling plots and threats and motives lights up the darkness with a poet's grace. Reading him is like watching somebody juggle a dozen bottles of single malt without spilling a drop." --KIRKUS REVIEWS "A brutal but beautifully written series...Rankin pushes the procedural form well past conventional genre limits." --THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Detective Inspector John Rebus is buried under a pile of paperwork generated by his investigations into a suspected war criminal, and his immediate supervisors are more than happy to have him tucked away in a quiet backwater for several months. However, the escalating dispute between upstart Tommy Telford and Big Ger Cafferty's gang soon gives Rebus an escape clause. Telford is known to have close ties to a man nicknamed Mr. Pink Eyes, a brutal gangster running a lucrative business bringing Chechen refugees into Britain to work as prostitutes. And when Rebus takes under his wing a distraught Bosnian call girl, it gives him a personal reason to make sure Telford takes the high road out of town. Within days, Rebus's daughter is the victim of an all-too-professional hit-and-run, and Rebus knows that there's nothing he won't do to bring down prime suspect Tommy Telford - even if it means cutting a deal with the devil.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This sprawling, overloaded mystery from a justly acclaimed and usually very reliable crime author is a disappointment. Through nine previous novels (Black and Blue), dogged Edinburgh copper John Rebus has been captivating company -- a man willing to place career before family and known to find solace in the bottle as his personal life takes an inevitable pounding. In this latest, Rebus' woes are strictly secondary (even as his daughter Samantha lies in a coma after a hit and run) as unsuspecting Edinburgh is rapidly transformed into the crime capital of the Western world. New hoodlum Tommy Telford is taking over, running whores imported from Eastern Europe, conspiring with Japanese businessmen to buy golf courses and selling drugs from the back of an ice cream van. All this upsets Ger Rafferty, the reigning hoodlum, who's stuck in prison and friendly with Rebus. Rebus makes a deal with Ger to take Telford down. Rebus also gives shelter to a suicidal prostitute and investigates the life and times of Joseph Lintz, a retired academic and alleged Nazi war criminal. A supremely implausible piece of plotting links Lintz to Telford's crowd. The evolution of Scotland's capital city into a gangster-riddled Babylon is bold, but all the canny procedural detail that Rankin is known for is lamentably jettisoned for a train wreck of a novel that aims for cinematic epic mayhem but achieves only narrative chaos instead.

Library Journal

John Rebus (Let It Bleed, LJ 12/96), an Edinburgh detective-inspector and father of a 24-year-old daughter, feels especially protective of a young Serbian woman coerced into prostitution by a local mobster. The woman's inability to communicate adds to the frustration of an unproductive, ongoing police surveillance and the continuation of crimes associated with the mobster. At the same time, Rebus investigates a local ex-Nazi's alleged role in a French war crime. This is a realistic police procedural with a human touch, including the old question of guilt-by-following-orders. An excellent choice for all collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Staying on top of two complex investigations is tough enough, but what really has Inspector John Rebus up the wall is staying on the wagon. Here's Edinburgh about to be become the scene of an all-out gang war, and there's Rebus, the born-again teetotaler, doing what he can to stop it. Which at first isn't much. Nor are the local thugs getting his full attention, since a new case has him running around in unproductive circles (while thinking what a power of good a wee dram might do for his morale). Rebus is investigating one Joseph Lintz, who may or may not be Josef Linzstek, a notorious Nazi war criminal who, as an SS lieutenant in 1941, wiped out an entire French village of 700 men, women, and children. And such a benign, unassuming little man this Lintz seems to be. Suddenly, unexpectedly, it turns up that he has connections to Tommy Telford, local mob chieftain. And Tommy, in his turn, has begun to demonstrate connections of a distinctly multinational flavor. Before you can say drugs and 'prossies,' Rebus' patch is awash in entrepreneurial emissaries from the Yakuza and the Chechens (Japanese and Russian mafia). Add to all this the woe and worry of a hit-and-run that fells his beloved daughter. Accident? Or is it gangspeak for 'back off, Rebus'? Once again, action that's relentlessly slam-bang, plotting that's labyrinthine. Rebus, a puzzle to himself and an enigma to everyone else, especially that array of interesting ladies who've been drawn to him over the course of nine outings (Black and Blue), remains one of the most charismatic heroes in contemporary crime fiction.