The 'king of tartan noir', as one critic has called him, Ian Rankin has written a bestselling series of books featuring his lone-wolf police detective John Rebus. The Rebus novels are set in Edinburgh and portray a city radically different from the traditional tourist image of Princes Street and the Royal Mile. Rankin's Edinburgh is a world of junkie squats, decaying housing estates, gang wars and political corruption. From the very first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, published in 1987, it was clear that here was a character who was more complex than the run-of-the-mill maverick cop and Rankin has become more and more ambitious as the series has progressed. Later novels do not only reveal the underbelly of tourist Edinburgh; they aim to encompass the whole of Scottish society and to do so by stretching the boundaries of crime fiction to include territory not usually visited by genre writers.

Probably the best of the entire series is Black and Blue, a wonderfully wide-ranging panorama of contemporary Scotland. 'Bible John' was the name given by the media to a serial killer in the 1970s. He was never caught. Now a copycat killer is at work. Rebus, struggling with a drink problem and unsympathetic superiors, has been sidelined. But, as another investigation takes him from Glasgow ganglands to Aberdeen and an offshore oilrig, he is drawn into the web of intrigue and corruption that surrounds the search for the killer now known as 'Johnny Bible'. His own obsession with the earlier case, his loyalty to the memory of an old colleague and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge his need for others come together to threaten Rebus's personal and professional life in a novel that brilliantly combines a sophisticated and complex plot with a convincing exploration of the inner world of its divided and ambiguous central character.

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