Rebus is off the case. A few days into a murder inquiry following the brutal death of an Edinburgh art dealer, Rebus blows up at DCS Gill Templer. He is sent to the Scottish Police College for 'retraining'. In other words, he's in the Last Chance Saloon.Rebus is given an old, unsolved case to work on, in order to teach him and others the merits of teamwork. But there are those in the team who have their own secrets - and they'll stop at nothing to protect them. As if this wasn't enough, Rebus is asked to act as a go-between for gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty. And as newly promoted DS Siobhan Clarke works the case of the murdered art dealer, she is brought closer to Cafferty than she could ever have anticipated . . . Review This is Rankin at his best, and, boy, that's saying somethingQuite apart from their excellence as detective novels, every one of them adds something interesting to our understanding of the social landscape of Edinburgh, which Rankin portrays with such subtlety and sensitivityAs is usual with Rebus novels, the plot is so thick you could stand a spoon up in it ... Rankin's Rebus novels should be required reading for anyone whose knowledge of Edinburgh has been derived from visits to the Festival ... Rankin is still very much a Category A crime writerResurrection Men is Rebus's 13th outing, and it bears all the qualities that have established Rankin as one of Britain's leading novelists in any genre: a powerful sense of place; a redefinition of Scotland and its past; persuasive dialogue; and a growing compassion among its characters'As Ian Rankin and Inspector Rebus are regular visitors to the bestsellers list I see no reason whyResurrection Men should not follow that well-trodden path. All the Rankin virtues are present - compulsive readability, sharp dialogue, the believable pettiness of the police procedural background and, looming over the book as ever, the formidable presence of the Jekyll-and-Hyde city of Edinburgh. There is also, at times, a wonderful economy that can capture an entire atmosphere in a few wordsRankin is pretty much unrivalled at the vivid delineation of character. John Rebus, tormented, dogged, moral, his prickliness repelling those he most wants to attract, remains one of the great creations of modern mystery fiction.Resurrection Men is right up there with the best of this terrific seriesIn the Rebus books Rankin has created an Edinburgh that is textured, vivid, plausible, perhaps even real ... Even viewed solely as a whodunit,Resurrection Men stands some distance above the competition. Rankins juggles three tense and fascinating, apparently unrelated cases, each of which for a lesser writer would be a book in itself, before late in the novel drawing them together in a clever, unexpected but utterly convincing denouementRankin is a phenomenon. He has made Edinburgh an imaginary or rather fully imagined city as nobody, except Spark, has done since Stevenson ... With each book I find myself wondering if he can pull it off again; so far he has never failed. I would rather read Rankin than any other living Scottish writer except Muriel Spark and William McIlvanney ... They call his work crime fiction, but the adjective is superfluous ... these novels are totally absorbing. Once I start reading one, all else goes by the board till I have finished itThe thirteenth novel in Rankin's Rebus series is his most mature work yet. His pacing is so acute and the supporting characters are so well drawn that this book escapes the shackles of the crime novel genre and can be classed as great fiction, full stop Book Description The 13th Inspector Rebus novel from No.1 bestselling author Ian Rankin. 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.