Showing results by author "Ian Rankin" in All Categories

When his daughter, Samantha, calls in the dead of night, John Rebus knows it’s not good news. Her husband has been missing for two days. Rebus fears the worst - and knows from his lifetime in the police that his daughter will be the prime suspect. He wasn’t the best father - the job always came first - but now his daughter needs him more than ever. But is he going as a father or a detective?

Detective John Rebus' city is being terrorized by a baffling series of murders…and he's tied to a maniac by an invisible knot of blood. As the ghoulish killings mount and the tabloid headlines scream, Rebus cannot stop the feverish shrieks from within his own mind. Because he isn't just one cop trying to catch a killer - he's the man who's got all the pieces to the puzzle…

Rebus' retirement is disrupted once again when skeletal remains are identified as a private investigator who went missing more than a decade earlier. The remains, found in a rusted car in the East Lothian woods, not far from Edinburgh, quickly turn into a cold-case murder investigation. Rebus' old friend Siobhan Clarke is assigned to the case, but neither of them could have predicted what buried secrets the investigation will uncover.  

In a shadowy, crumbling Edinburgh housing development, a junkie lies dead of an overdose, his body surrounded by signs of Satanic worship. Inspector John Rebus could call it an accident. But won’t. Now he’s got to search the city, from the tunnels of its dark underbelly to the private sanctum of the upper crust, to find the perfect hiding place for a killer.

John Rebus is on a train from Edinburgh to London, where he has been drafted for his expertise in the modus operandi of serial killers. The Wolfman could be his toughest case yet - a serial killer named by the press due to a terrifying trademark of taking a bite from each victim. Rebus' Scotland Yard opposite number, George Flight, isn't too happy at yet another interference in the investigation - especially from an upstart jock hounding him at every turn.

Inspector John Rebus has messed up badly this time, so badly that he's been sent to a kind of reform school for damaged cops. While there among the last-chancers known as "resurrection men," he joins a covert mission to gain evidence of a drug heist orchestrated by three of his classmates. But the group has been assigned an unsolved murder that may have resulted from Rebus's own mistake.

Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is feeling the heat. She's investigating the death of a senior government prosecutor, David Minton, who has friends in high places. When one of their own is killed, the powers that be want answers fast. But Clarke is puzzled: If Minton died in a robbery as everyone thinks, why is nothing missing from his home? The answer may lie not in what was taken but in what was left behind at the scene - an ominous note.

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 tiny flats of the Scottish chic, Rebus uncovers a chain of crime, deceit, and hidden sins.

"The master storyteller" (Guardian) weaves a gripping story of mystery and suspense, threaded through with some of the most important issues and themes of our time, in the new John Rebus thriller. 

When a former soldier and recluse murders two 17-year-old students at a posh Edinburgh boarding school, Inspector John Rebus immediately suspects there is more to the case than meets the eye.

The Complaints: that's the name given to the Internal Affairs department who seek out dirty and compromised cops, the ones who've made deals with the devil. And sometimes The Complaints must travel. A major inquiry into a neighboring police force sees Malcolm Fox and his colleagues cast adrift, unsure of territory, protocol, or who they can trust. An entire station-house looks to have been compromised, but as Fox digs deeper, he finds the trail leads him back in time to the suicide of a prominent politician and activist.

As he settles into an uneasy retirement, Rebus has given up his favorite vices. There's just one habit he can't shake: He can't let go of an unsolved case. It's the only pastime he has left, and up until now it's the only one that wasn't threatening to kill him. But when Rebus starts reexamining the facts behind the long-ago murder of a glamorous woman at a luxurious hotel - on the same night a famous rock star and his entourage were also staying there - the past comes roaring back to life with a vengeance.

In Europe, the Americans are pulling out their troops in a tide of isolationism. Britain, torn between loyalties to America and the continent, is caught in the middle. Across the pond, a space shuttle crashes on landing, killing all but one of the crew on board: a British citizen named Mike Dreyfuss, who will become vilified by the US press and protesters. Halfway across the world, at English ground control headquarters, Martin Hepton watches with dismay as they lose contact with the most advanced satellite in Europe.

Gold Dagger-winner and best-selling author in the United Kingdom, Ian Rankin crafts absorbing crime novels with solidly drawn characters and first-rate plotting. In Strip Jack, he portrays a shocking murder investigation that exposes the sordid side of Edinburgh politics and society. Detective John Rebus suspects a set-up when a respected Member of Parliament is caught in a police raid on a brothel—and his flamboyant wife suddenly disappears.

A missing student, a six inch coffin containing a wooden doll, and mysterious role-playing games on the Internet are the intriguing elements of the latest case to challenge Inspector Rebus. The missing student comes from an influential family, and Rebus begins to get a bad feeling about the case in Warsaw. While Rebus follows up a link with the distant past, his DC, Siobhan Clarke, tackles the Internet challenges set by the mysterious Quizmaster.

For the first time in 300 years, Scotland has its own Parliament, and to go with it, its own newly developed Parliament buildings. Detective Inspector John Rebus views the whole thing through a rather jaundiced eye, given that he's been chosen to liaise with the restructuring of the whole building.

DI Rebus is buried under a pile of paperwork but an escalating dispute between the upstart Tommy Telford and Big Ger Cafferty's gang gives Rebus an escape clause. Telford is known to have close links with a Chechen gangster bringing refugees into Britain as prostitutes. When Rebus takes under his wing a distraught Bosnian call girl, it gives him a personal reason to make sure Telford goes back to Paisley and pronto.

Drugs. Extortion. Slavery. Organized crime is fighting for a hold on John Rebus's peaceful Scotland. And when Rebus rescues a young Bosnian girl forced into prostitution, he breaks a policeman's golden rule to never get personally involved in a case. Add to that the hunt for an elderly Nazi accused of slaughtering an entire French village, and Rebus wonders just how evil humans can be - until his own daughter is mortally injured as a gangland warning for him to back off. Then even a dedicated cop like Rebus might make a deal with the devil to find the culprit. Not for justice. For revenge.

The leaders of the free world descend on Scotland for an international conference, and every cop in the country is needed for front-line duty - except one. John Rebus' reputation precedes him, and his bosses don't want him anywhere near Presidents Bush and Putin, which explains why he's manning an abandoned police station when a call comes in. During a preconference dinner at Edinburgh Castle, a delegate has fallen to his death. Accident, suicide, or something altogether more sinister?

In Edinburgh you're never far from a peaceful spot, or from a hellish one either. Now, in the heart of summer, in the midst of a nationalist festival, Inspector John Rebus is on the murder case of a young man left hanging in a spot where his screams would never be heard. To find the victim's identity - and his killer - Rebus searches from Edinburgh's most violent neighborhood to Belfast, Northern Ireland, among petty thugs, gunrunners, and heavyweight criminals. But before Rebus can get to the truth, he's bloodied by the dream of society's madmen - and staring into the glint of a killer's eyes.