A junkie lies dead in an Edinburgh squat spreadeagled, cross-like on the floor, between two burned-down candles, a five-pointed star daubed on the wall above. Just another dead addict, until John Rebus begins to chip away at the indifference, treachery, deceit and sleaze that lurks beneath the façade of the Edinburgh familiar to the tourists. Only Rebus seems to care about a death which looks more like a murder every day, about a seductive danger he can almost taste, appealing to the darkest corners of his mind.
Reviews
'His fiction buzzes with energy. Essentially he is a romantic storyteller in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson... His prose is as vivid and terse as the next man's yet its flexibility and rhythm give it a potential for lyrical expression which is distinctively Rankin's own. Rankin controls the material with extraordinary authority and even delicacy... Rankin ranks alongside P.D. James and Michael Dibdin as Britain's finest detective novelist'
Scotland on Sunday
'Rankin has followed one success with another. Sardonic and assured, the novel has a powerful and well-paced narrative... What is striking is the way Rankin uses laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath'
Description:
A junkie lies dead in an Edinburgh squat spreadeagled, cross-like on the floor, between two burned-down candles, a five-pointed star daubed on the wall above. Just another dead addict, until John Rebus begins to chip away at the indifference, treachery, deceit and sleaze that lurks beneath the façade of the Edinburgh familiar to the tourists. Only Rebus seems to care about a death which looks more like a murder every day, about a seductive danger he can almost taste, appealing to the darkest corners of his mind.
Reviews
'His fiction buzzes with energy. Essentially he is a romantic storyteller in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson... His prose is as vivid and terse as the next man's yet its flexibility and rhythm give it a potential for lyrical expression which is distinctively Rankin's own. Rankin controls the material with extraordinary authority and even delicacy... Rankin ranks alongside P.D. James and Michael Dibdin as Britain's finest detective novelist'
Scotland on Sunday
'Rankin has followed one success with another. Sardonic and assured, the novel has a powerful and well-paced narrative... What is striking is the way Rankin uses laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath'
Independent