When an author as successful as Rankin has been with his tough and idiomatic Scottish thrillers, a problem sets in after several books: how to keep the formula fresh.

Rankin has delivered a powerful series of books featuring his beleaguered Detective Inspector John Rebus, and while never less than gripping, a certain tiredness seemed to be setting in. Thankfully, Dead Souls is a resounding return to form, with a plot as enjoyably labyrinthine as any Rankin enthusiast could wish for, and pithy dialogue that fairly leaps off the page. Stalking the streets of Edinburgh on the trail of a poisoner, Rebus hits upon a freed pedophile and his subsequent outing of the man leaves him with very mixed feelings. But another problem develops for Rebus: a convicted murderer has him in his sights for some lethal games. And the tabloid press lionizing of Rebus won't help him in this situation.

As always, Rankin is perfectly ready to tackle contentious issues--precisely the thing that gives his books their powerful sense of veracity. And Rebus, no longer in danger of having a soap opera-like accumulation of personal problems, seems as fresh and well-observed a character as in those first exhilarating books. Rankin has caught his form again, with even more assurance. --Barry Forshaw, Amazon.co.uk


From Publishers Weekly
Edinburgh's Det. Insp. John Rebus is beset by troubles from the past and the present in the loose and rangy 11th installment (after The Hanging Garden) of Rankin's popular (and, in England, bestselling) series. At the outset, Rebus, who's been drinking too much, endures frequent visitations from his recently deceased comrade-in-arms, Jack Morton, and suffers helplessly as his daughter struggles to recover from a hit-and-run accident that's left her paralyzed. Rebus's troubles are soon reflected in the old city around him: violent grassroots vigilantism breaks out in a housing project when Rebus informs the press that a convicted child molester is living in one of the flats; Cary Oakes, a serial killer just released from a U.S. prison, returns to Edinburgh; a rising star in the police department dies in an apparent suicide. In addition, as Rebus testifies in a high-profile case of sexual abuse of children, two old school friends ask him to search for their missing son. And as the cop pursues each of these cases, Oakes draws him into a sadistic game of cat-and-mouse. While the many plot lines pull the narrative in disparate directions, the whole is held together by Rankin's drum-tight characterization of Rebus as a man deeply shaken in his convictions, but unwilling to fall apart. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Scottish literature has recently enjoyed a renaissance with the emergence of such exciting writers as Irvine Welsh and James Kelman. They are joined on the mystery front by Rankin, an Edgar-nominated author of a series of complex police procedurals featuring Edinburgh detective John Rebus. Here, Rebus, still struggling to make sense of the suicide of a close friend and fellow officer, is keeping tabs on a recently released pedophile living in a housing project. At the same time, he has to track a convicted serial killer deported from the States and find the missing son of his high school sweetheart. As usual, Rankin combines several complicated plot lines, memorable characters, a touch of mordant Gaelic wit, and a gritty Edinburgh setting to create a dense read that starts slowly but rewards patient readers with a compelling and haunting d?nouement. Strongly recommended for all collections.AWilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Rankin's police procedurals are set in rainy Edinburgh, and feature the crusty and interesting Detective Inspector Rebus and his crew. This time they're investigating a host of cases, including the apparent suicide of a colleague, a released serial killer, a missing teenager, and a released pedophile. Only Rebus can imagine any connections. Using vocal nuances, Geoffrey Howard conveys the atmosphere of Rebus's Edinburgh--its slums and pubs, and their inhabitants. He also conveys the fine points of character in a well-paced and involving performance. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
"Something's gone bad inside you." Edinburgh copper John Rebus might once have laughed at such a melodramatic statement, especially about himself, but this time he's forced to take stock. Ever since the death of his mentor, Rebus has been drifting from cynicism to nihilism, and now he may have hit bottom: his patented outbursts seem more gratuitous than heroic; his single-mindedness on the job has become more obsessive and mean-spirited. And the unsavory smorgasbord of cases on his plate only intensifies his personal crisis: the seeming suicide of a friend and fellow copper; the disappearance of his high-school sweetheart's son; and the appearance in Edinburgh of a serial killer deported from the U.S. As the missing-person investigation brings to the fore unresolved issues from Rebus' past ("dialogues of the left-unsaid"), the serial killer begins to play mind games of his own with the coppers who follow him, especially Rebus. Traditionally, the reader sees the hero of a crime novel as the force for order in a chaotic world; even in the contemporary British procedural, where the copper-heroes are often overwhelmed by the chaos around them, we identify with their browbeaten refusal to abandon ship. Remarkably, Rankin ups the ante here by finding in his hero's soul traces of the same gangrene that eats away at society. We care about him not as a hero but as a victim, infected by the diseases he seeks to treat. Not everyone will want to follow the crime novel where Rankin dares to take it, but for those who do, the journey will be unforgettable. Bill Ott


From Kirkus Reviews
Increasinglythough still in his 40sDetective Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh police has been sounding the autumnal note. The tenth in his series (The Hanging Garden, 1998, etc.) finds him full in the winter of his discontent. Bleak questions prevail. Will his daughter's automobile accident leave her permanently crippled? Has his relationship with his lover plummeted past the irretrievable? And what about his job? Has he lost his sense of vocation? One of his colleagues thinks so. ``Something in you has gone bad, John,'' she tells him. After a stakeout at the Edinburgh zoo, Rebus makes a bad mistakearrests the wrong mansetting in motion a chain of events that leads to a brutal murder. Now Rebus is face to face with that most searching of all questions, one that early in his career would have been unimaginable: Should he actually quit? But then the pace of events accelerates swiftly. There's time only to pursue the links between the death he may have caused, a young man's inexplicable disappearance, and a fellow cop's apparent suicide. He connects them, of course. And in the process tracks down a particularly vicious murderer whose cleverness and talent for gamesmanship is sufficient to force Rebus to the top of his own game. Rebus in action is Rebus restored. Some lives, he decideshis own, for instanceare best left unexamined. Hard-drinking, hard-living Rebus remains a compelling figure, but in a book this long he gets too much time to pick at himself. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Kirkus Reviews
"Hard-drinking, hard-living Rebus remains a compelling figure."


Review
"Hard-drinking, hard-living Rebus remains a compelling figure." --Kirkus Reviews

"Rankin [creates] a drum-tight characterization of Rebus as a man deeply shaken by his convictions, but unwilling to fall apart. " --Publishers Weekly



Review
"Hard-drinking, hard-living Rebus remains a compelling figure." --Kirkus Reviews

"Rankin [creates] a drum-tight characterization of Rebus as a man deeply shaken by his convictions, but unwilling to fall apart. " --Publishers Weekly



Book Description
Weary, wary, hard-drinking Detective John Rebus returns in author Ian Rankin's internationally acclaimed, award-winning series. As complex and unpredictable as the brooding mists that envelop his Edinburgh beat, Rebus is ever resourceful and determined-but this time, vulnerable and challenged as never before, with complications in his personal life, and events that shake him to the depths of his being... A colleague's suicide. Pedophiles. A missing child. A serial killer. You never know your luck, muses Rebus. Driven by instinct and experience, he searches for connections, against official skepticism. But at night, unsoothed by whiskey, Rebus faces his ghosts-and the prospect of his daughter's possibly permanent paralysis. Soldiering through dank, desperate slums and the tony flats of the Scottish chic, Rebus uncovers a chain of crime, deceit, and hidden sins-knowing it's himself he's really trying to save. . .



From the Publisher
9 1.5-hour cassettes


About the Author
Ian Rankin is the author of nine previous novels, including Black and Blue, which won England's prestigious Gold Dagger Award and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Rough Times for Inspector Rebus

The dead souls who parade through the pages of Ian Rankin's latest novel -- his 12th in the long-running series featuring Chief Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh CID -- assume a wide variety of forms. Some are ghosts, specters of murder investigations past and present. Some are criminals: murderers, pedophiles, moral bankrupts of every sort. And one -- at least potentially -- is Rebus himself, who has come dangerously close to losing his ethical bearings and becoming like the people he is paid to hunt down.

Dead Souls opens at a particularly vulnerable moment in Rebus's perpetually disordered life. He is still mourning the recent death of his friend and mentor, Jack Morton. His daughter Sammy, product of a marriage that has long since ended in divorce, is crippled and confined to a wheelchair, the victim of a hit-and-run driver whose actual target had been Rebus himself. He is drinking more than he should and alienating his superiors, his fellow officers, and his current live-in lover, the aptly named Patience Aitken. These various personal crises form the emotional backdrop against which Rankin skillfully deploys a complex, ultimately interconnected series of criminal investigations.

The first of the novel's numerous narrative threads concerns the suicide of an up-and-coming Edinburgh policeman named Jim Margolies, who inexplicably leaps from the top of a local landmark called Salisbury Crag. A second, apparently unrelated thread concerns the fate of a recently released pedophile named Darren Rough. Darren is attempting to live a quiet, anonymous life in an Edinburgh housing project called Greenfield when he is "outed" to a local newspaper by John Rebus. This pointlessly vindictive action inflames the community and results, inevitably, in violence. Darren's presence in Edinburgh is directly connected to another of the novel's central narrative threads: the Shiellion case, a highly publicized affair in which the adult guardians of a church-sponsored children's home stand accused of the long-term, systematic abuse of the children under their care.

All of this is further complicated by two additional factors. In the first of these, Rebus receives a phone call from Janice Mee, a former high school flame whose 19-year-old son has just gone missing. Rebus's subsequent involvement with Janice stirs up long-buried memories and tantalizes him with images of paths he might have taken. The second complication results from the unexpected arrival of Cary Oakes, a convicted serial killer who has just completed a 15-year sentence in the American prison system. Oakes has returned home to Edinburgh to settle some old scores and to engage the locals -- Rebus among them -- in a series of sadistic games. His various manipulations reach into every corner of this complicated book, radically affecting the lives and relationships of many of its central characters.

Dead Souls is neither a simple narrative nor a neatly constructed one. It is, rather, a kitchen sink sort of novel whose many competing story lines interrupt and alternate with one another, crossing and recrossing endlessly as they slowly begin to establish some unforeseen connections. By the same token, Rankin offers relatively little in the way of easy resolutions or traditional narrative closure. By the end of this book, a number of relationships and central plot elements remain unresolved, and justice itself is partially, imperfectly, served. Art, in this case, deliberately imitates life.

Still, Dead Souls does provide its readers with a large number of compensating satisfactions. It is a dark, often powerful narrative that brings a corner of contemporary Scotland to vivid life, offering us a gallery of closely observed characters from all across the social and economic spectrum. Its central figure, John Rebus, is sometimes admirable, sometimes callous and cruel. But he is always believable, always recognizably human.

In addition, Rankin has much to say about the long-term effects of abuse, sexual and otherwise; about the peculiar pathology of the criminal mind; about the universal fragility of human relationships; and about the gradual, painful poisoning of the individual spirit. Dead Souls is an honest, deeply felt novel with a great deal of cumulative power. It is well worth your time and attention and comes highly recommended to anyone with an interest in ambitious, wide-ranging crime fiction that tests the limits of the form.

—Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Weary, wary, hard-drinking Detective John Rebus returns in author Ian Rankin's internationally acclaimed, award-winning series. As complex and unpredictable as the brooding mists that envelop his Edinburgh beat, Rebus is ever resourceful and determined-but this time, vulnerable and challenged as never before, with complications in his personal life, and events that shake him to the depths of his being... A colleague's suicide. Pedophiles. A missing child. A serial killer. You never know your luck, muses Rebus. Driven by instinct and experience, he searches for connections, against official skepticism. But at night, unsoothed by whiskey, Rebus faces his ghosts-and the prospect of his daughter's possibly permanent paralysis. Soldiering through dank, desperate slums and the tony flats of the Scottish chic, Rebus uncovers a chain of crime, deceit, and hidden sins-knowing it's himself he's really trying to save...

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Edinburgh's Det. Insp. John Rebus is beset by troubles from the past and the present in the loose and rangy 11th installment (after The Hanging Garden) of Rankin's popular (and, in England, bestselling) series. At the outset, Rebus, who's been drinking too much, endures frequent visitations from his recently deceased comrade-in-arms, Jack Morton, and suffers helplessly as his daughter struggles to recover from a hit-and-run accident that's left her paralyzed. Rebus's troubles are soon reflected in the old city around him: violent grassroots vigilantism breaks out in a housing project when Rebus informs the press that a convicted child molester is living in one of the flats; Cary Oakes, a serial killer just released from a U.S. prison, returns to Edinburgh; a rising star in the police department dies in an apparent suicide. In addition, as Rebus testifies in a high-profile case of sexual abuse of children, two old school friends ask him to search for their missing son. And as the cop pursues each of these cases, Oakes draws him into a sadistic game of cat-and-mouse. While the many plot lines pull the narrative in disparate directions, the whole is held together by Rankin's drum-tight characterization of Rebus as a man deeply shaken in his convictions, but unwilling to fall apart. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Scottish literature has recently enjoyed a renaissance with the emergence of such exciting writers as Irvine Welsh and James Kelman. They are joined on the mystery front by Rankin, an Edgar-nominated author of a series of complex police procedurals featuring Edinburgh detective John Rebus. Here, Rebus, still struggling to make sense of the suicide of a close friend and fellow officer, is keeping tabs on a recently released pedophile living in a housing project. At the same time, he has to track a convicted serial killer deported from the States and find the missing son of his high school sweetheart. As usual, Rankin combines several complicated plot lines, memorable characters, a touch of mordant Gaelic wit, and a gritty Edinburgh setting to create a dense read that starts slowly but rewards patient readers with a compelling and haunting d nouement. Strongly recommended for all collections.--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Increasingly—though still in his 40s—Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh police has been sounding the autumnal note. The tenth in his series (The Hanging Garden, 1998, etc.) finds him full in the winter of his discontent. Bleak questions prevail. Will his daughter's automobile accident leave her permanently crippled? Has his relationship with his lover plummeted past the irretrievable? And what about his job? Has he lost his sense of vocation? One of his colleagues thinks so. "Something in you has gone bad, John," she tells him. After a stakeout at the Edinburgh zoo, Rebus makes a bad mistake—arrests the wrong man—setting in motion a chain of events that leads to a brutal murder. Now Rebus is face to face with that most searching of all questions, one that early in his career would have been unimaginable: Should he actually quit? But then the pace of events accelerates swiftly. There's time only to pursue the links between the death he may have caused, a young man's inexplicable disappearance, and a fellow cop's apparent suicide. He connects them, of course. And in the process tracks down a particularly vicious murderer whose cleverness and talent for gamesmanship is sufficient to force Rebus to the top of his own game. Rebus in action is Rebus restored. Some lives, he decides—his own, for instance—are best left unexamined. Hard-drinking, hard-living Rebus remains a compelling figure, but in a book this long he gets too much time to pick at himself.