Standing In Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin
Little, Brown, $25.99, 388 pages, ISBN 978-0-316-22458-1
One of the most interesting characters in all of crime fiction literature is a champion of seemingly lost causes named John Rebus. You may have seen him on PBS television. He’s the irascible, grouchy, and brilliant Scottish Detective Inspector from Edinburg created some twenty years ago by a Scotsman writer named Ian Rankin; and, like a rare single malt whiskey, he gets better with age.
Standing In Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin is the twentieth in the series. Like all of Rankin’s work it is intelligent, finely-crafted and engaging. It begins with a retired DI Rebus working in a civilian capacity, organizing and looking into cold case files, while at the same time doing his best to annoy his young and ambitious supervisor. But when he meets a woman named Nina Hazlitt, everything changes. She’s been looking for her daughter, a young woman named Sally who disappeared ten years ago. Her case fell off the police radar screens as more current and urgent ones turned up, because there’s no body, no suspect, and no new clues. But Rebus, like a Don Quixote of the Edinburg Police Department, agrees to look into it . . . in spite of Nina Hazlitt’s reputation around the department as a crank. When Rebus discovers that two other young women have disappeared on the same remote stretch of road, his intuition and experience lead him to believe that the case may involve an unknown, undiscovered, and as yet unidentified, serial killer . . . and all he has to do is convince his skeptical, underfunded and stressed out former colleagues to believe him. Did I mention that Rebus, in addition to annoying every supervisor he’s ever had, has a drinking problem and hangs out with a couple of organized crime bosses . . . which has him being investigated by the Internal Affairs Section? Read this excellent and finely-crafted novel for yourself, and see why Rebus has been called one of the finest characters to ever come along in the detective genre and Ian Rankin is known as the best living British crime writer. You’ll not be disappointed.
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