Product Description

Edinburgh is about to become the home of the first Scottish parliament in nigh on 300 years. As political passions run high, DI John Rebus is charged with liaison, thanks to the new parliament being resident in Queensbury House, bang in the middle of his patch. But Queensbury House has its own, dark past. Legend has it that a young man was roasted there on a spit by a madman. When the fireplace where the youth died is uncovered another more recent murder victim is found. Days later, in the gardens outside, there is a third body. This victim is Roddy Grieve, a prospective MSP, and Rebus is under pressure to find instant answers. As the case proceeds, the Inspector finds himself face to face with one of Edinburgh's most notorious criminals...

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #211773 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Two masked men abduct women on their way home from singles bars; a mummified corpse turns up bricked into a fireplace in one of devolved Scotland's new government buildings; a prospective New Labour candidate is battered to death; and Inspector Rebus's old antagonist Ger Cafferty is allowed home from prison to die of cancer...Ian Rankin's gloomy new crime novel has all the usual ingredients of his Rebus series--Rebus's drinking, his messy relationships with women and his inability to get on with his superiors and more ambitious equals are traits more usually associated with private eye novels than with police procedurals, but they help explain why a cop with Rebus's high clear-up rate has avoided promotion to a desk.

Everyone told him that this was a sign, that he was here because the chiefs at the Big House had plans for him. But Rebus knew better. He knew that his boss had put his name forward because he was hoping to keep Rebus out of trouble and out of his hair...And if--if--Rebus accepted without complaining and saw the assignment through, then maybe the Farmer would receive a chastened Rebus back into the fold.

The Edinburgh atmosphere--from the forced politeness of smart dinner parties to the hair-trigger violence of slum pubs--is as admirable as ever, and Rebus's capacity for working things out slowly in his own head remains as plausible as ever as a description of a particular kind of dogged intelligence. Like several books in this series, this is also an intelligent novel of the New Scots Politics--part of what makes Rebus both a successful investigator and doomed to offend the powerful is his unerring instinct for the scandalous and the corrupt. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into thirty-six languages and are bestsellers worldwide. Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers' Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America's celebrated Edgar Award for Resurrection Men. He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Award in the USA, won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University. A contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts. Rankin is a number one bestseller in the UK and has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.

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Customer Reviews

Rich and complex - a cut above your average thiller
I have read about 6 of the Rebus books and this is easily the the best of the lot. A huge array of characters all unique and identifiable, a complex plot with a stunning ending and as ever the stong sense of a location in time and space all add up a brilliant novel.

As others have said one of the great things about this book is the interaction between the characters I can't imagine any other 'genre' writer could handle such a large cast so well. Combine this with a strong plot which will hold your attention to the last page and you have an outstanding book.

Good stuff - all to do with the characters
I am an Inspector Rebus fan and I am hooked. I also can understand that someone reading this book, as their first exposure to the genre, would be a little confused and perhaps disappointed. My advice is - "read this series in published date sequence, i.e. start at the beginning of the Inspector Rebus series Knots & Crosses" - it is well worth the effort. The storyline is fair but also fairly predictable, my pleasure was derived from the interaction of the characters. For instance "Big Ger" is a villain but has some affection and respect for Rebus which is not overtly reciprocated. The situations Rebus finds himself in, where the hierarchy in the police condemns him and his methods, is understandable but still evokes our sympathy for our hero. I loved this book and once again I cannot wait till the next installment. Superb.

Where snakes in the ground go absolutely free
Farmer Watson has decided to keep Detective Inspector John Rebus out of trouble by assigning him to a committee concerned with the new Scottish Parliament's security. Rebus inspects the building work at Queensbury House with his colleagues, including fast-tracker Derek Linford. However, Rebus seems to attract trouble, and it's not long before a body is discovered...

I've only read the one Rebus novel before, The Hanging Garden, and in that earlier composition, Rebus seemed to work much more on his own. Set in Darkness is a more of an ensemble piece, and seems to hail from the tradition of the police procedural. Rebus's colleagues are very much in the limelight, featuring Linford's flirtation with Siobhan Clarke, and the 'Time Team' of Wylie and Hood. There are just as many coincidences as you'd find in three editions of TV's 'The Bill' (where the two crimes per episode are always inextricably linked). This is probably related to the Kevin Bacon game, the 'six degrees of separation' (where everyone on the planet has links with everyone else), mentioned in the novel. Rankin concentrates on the smaller universe that consists of Edinburgh, and this is more than enough. Indeed, so flourished is this novel with characters, that if you put the narrative down, you're bound to be really confused when you come back to it.

Not long after 'Skelly' is discovered in Queensbury House, the corpse of the prospective MSP Roddy Grieve is also found there. Siobhan Clarke witnesses the suicide of a tramp who had half a million in the bank. Meanwhile, two men are assaulting women from singles' clubs. Rebus's investigation brings him to Rosslyn Chapel, the cryptic home of cranks and the Knights Templar, the secretive movement that was the first police force, invented banking, that fought at Bannockburn, and laid the foundations of Scotland's Masonic tradition. However, Rebus is far more interested in the Edinburgh masons of the last twenty years, since the previous devolution referendum. Just whose is the body in the fireplace at Queensbury House? Early on in the novel, a historian relates a tale about the lunatic son of the Duke of Queensbury, who ate a servant on the night of the Act of Union, and left him on a spit in the fireplace. This is where Rankin is at his best - he employs the real Edinburgh to great effect. The Oxford Bar, Rebus's local, is a real hostelry. This adds a note of authenticity to Rankin's work, and it's quite stimulating trying to track down all the locations mentioned in this novel. It's also amusing to see Rebus's scepticism about devolution - rogues will always be rogues, no matter where they're housed. Ian Rankin also seems to be warming to his new career as literary critic. There's quite a bit of Hugh MacDiarmid in this book, fairly appropriately, as he was a founder of the Scottish Nationalist party. MacDiarmid also joined the Communist party at a quite inappropriate time. The Grieve family have been in politics for generations, starting from the Liberal Party, from Old to New Labour, with also a flirtation with the Tories. An artistic as well as a political family, they have an 'unknown' MacDiarmid poem hanging on the walls of their family home. MacDiarmid's real name was Christopher Murray Grieve (although he's no relation of the Grieve family here). He's not the only one to use a pseudonym in the novel: so does the mysterious suicide victim, 'Chris Mackie', but for less artistic reasons.

You don't have to have read all the other novels in this series to appreciate Set in Darkness. I can compare this with The Hanging Garden and see that Rankin still maintains his obsession with popular music (but then Rebus is an aficionado too, so that's alright - although this does mean that the inevitable recording session makes its way into the book). This might seem a bit tiresome, but then again I guess detectives do have to have some small talk to relax their subjects. Rebus says he's been reading up on his Edinburgh history recently, but so has Rankin too. Indeed, the city seems almost more alive than the inspector himself, even though most of its tales concern death. The mortality of someone very close to Rebus is brought into question, someone who seems larger than life, and someone with a lot more vitality than Rebus, say... I think one of the problems with Rebus is that he's so hard to picture, and as the TV producers have probably found, so very hard to cast. Rebus seems more thing than man, hard to make out from the shadows (not a pop reference). I see that Rankin's new novel is called 'The Falls' - will Rebus ride the Reichenbach, locked in mortal combat with his Moriarty, in the city where Doyle learnt from Bell? Has Ian Rankin grown tired of his creation? Or has he just developed a new obsession for the music of Mark E. Smith?