The Beat Goes On

June 29, 2015
The 31 rewarding stories in Edgar-winner Rankin’s complete John Rebus collection span the Scottish detective’s entire career, from his early days as a policeman learning the ropes right up to the time of his quasi-retirement. The best entries, such as “A Good Hanging,” which involves a murder disguised as a suicide during the Edinburgh fringe festival, feel like short novels. “Auld Lang Syne,” a superb tale set during a riotous New Year’s celebration, has a well-observed, even literary feel, while others offer traditional cases, such as “The Trap,” in which Rebus uncovers the truth about an aging husband’s deadly fall. Some Rebus fans will be familiar with many of the selections, which have been collected previously, but six have never been published in book form and two are written just for this volume. At short form, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, no-respect-for-authority Rebus, the star of 20 novels, remains a compelling character, and this thick tome is a welcome addition to the Rankin canon.

March 1, 2015

Rankin, a key purveyor of Tartin noir, is an internationally best-selling author with the Edgar Award and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger tucked into his belt. As august a publication as The New Yorker calls his Detective Inspector John Rebus "the ideal sleuth." Here, all of Rankin's Rebus short stories are collected for the first time.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
Rebus fans, rejoice: here are one novella, two new stories, and 28 reprinted tales about veteran detective John Rebus. This cross section of Rebus' career includes a month-by-month account of his detective work, starting with "Playback," a case that everyone but our hero considers open-and-shut. It's followed by a tale of a homeless man providing Rebus with a valuable clue in "Being Frank"; a vision of Jesus that helps solve a murder in "Seeing Things"; an assist from Shakespeare in "A Good Hanging"; and the cycle's final entry, in which an ex-con finds his own kind of peace at the year's end in "Auld Lang Syne." Christmas brings its offbeat crimes, too. "No Sanity Claus" shows how useful a holiday outfit can be for a small-time crook. In "St. Nicked," a Yuletide heist takes an unexpected turn. And Rebus finds himself in a showdown at the Festival of Santas in "Penalty Claus." In other previously published stories, the detective's keen ear cracks a case in "Talk Show," and his skill with crossword puzzles comes to the fore in "Trip Trap." Rebus, generally a notorious rule flouter, is unusually conscientious in "Facing the Music." The novella, Death Is Not the End, reunites Rebus with a childhood friend and an old flame. In "The Very Last Drop," the recently retired Rebus takes on a ghost in a brewery. The first of the two new stories, "The Passenger," concerns a woman who bought a one-way ticket on a solitary holiday, and the second shows the perennially hard-drinking Rebus running true to form when he's up against "A Three-Pint Problem." Rankin's (Saints of the Shadow Bible, 2014, etc.) canny cop is as gray and dour as his Edinburgh beat, but he's in fine form in these clever, occasionally touching, and often wryly funny vignettes.

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August 1, 2015
Rankin took a year-long sabbatical from writing recently, but he's back at it, with a new Rebus novel due in January 2016. In the meantime, for fans of the curmudgeonly Edinburgh police inspector, this collection of all the Rebus short stories should fill the bill nicely. The volume follows a more or less chronological approachin terms of Rebus' career rather than the publication dates of the storieswith selections from two previously published collections (A Good Hanging and Other Stories, 2002, and Beggars Banquet, 2003) bracketed by unpublished stories that find the inspector at the beginning and end of his career, respectively. Perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch, particularly for longtime Rebus followers, is Dead and Buried, which is set in the mid-1980s, when Rebus was a rookie copper, the same period covered via flashback in Saints of the Shadow Bible (2014). As in that novel, the story gives us a tantalizing glimpse of both sides of Rebus' ever-fascinating personality: the truth seeker and the rule breaker. This full meal of short courses offers a satisfying cross section from the career of one of crime fiction's most memorable characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)