Scan barcode
A review by plantbirdwoman
Dead Souls by Ian Rankin
5.0
After recently visiting the Edinburgh of Isabel Dalhousie in "The Careful Use of Compliments", I decided to linger a while. I've always liked Edinburgh, but I felt that I wanted to see a different side of it than the all thought and little action world of Isabel. Well, John Rebus is just the chap for that! No one could accuse him of living in a world of little action. As for thought, Rebus thinks a lot and usually gets to the answer to his problems in the end, but he is also known to act hastily and without much thought at times. That usually comes back to bite him and it does again in this book. The victims of his hastiness are the "dead souls" who haunt him.
This is one of the darker Rebus tales (not that any of them are especially light!) involving, as it does, pedophiles (who may or may not be linked to the Church), the suicide of a colleague, a psychopathic serial killer, and a bittersweet trip down memory lane as he is drawn into the search for a missing person, son of two of his classmates in school. Scotland is a small country and Edinburgh still has something of a village culture. You just know that somewhere along the way all these disparate stories are going to intersect and the result will probably not be pretty. But it will be entertaining.
Ian Rankin has created a compelling fictional figure in John Rebus. He is, at his core, a deeply moral character, but he has lost much of his faith, along with many friends and family members, along the way. Drink is his anesthetic of choice and he seems to require more and more of it to ease his pain. This cannot be leading to a good place.
I have enjoyed all of the Rebus novels, but I must say this is my favorite of the lot so far. The writing is crisp, the plotting is tight, and the main character seems more fully realized here than in any of the previous books, and none of them were half-bad either. The ending of the book left me wanting to get on to the next chapter in the story, and so I think I may linger in Edinburgh just a bit longer.
This is one of the darker Rebus tales (not that any of them are especially light!) involving, as it does, pedophiles (who may or may not be linked to the Church), the suicide of a colleague, a psychopathic serial killer, and a bittersweet trip down memory lane as he is drawn into the search for a missing person, son of two of his classmates in school. Scotland is a small country and Edinburgh still has something of a village culture. You just know that somewhere along the way all these disparate stories are going to intersect and the result will probably not be pretty. But it will be entertaining.
Ian Rankin has created a compelling fictional figure in John Rebus. He is, at his core, a deeply moral character, but he has lost much of his faith, along with many friends and family members, along the way. Drink is his anesthetic of choice and he seems to require more and more of it to ease his pain. This cannot be leading to a good place.
I have enjoyed all of the Rebus novels, but I must say this is my favorite of the lot so far. The writing is crisp, the plotting is tight, and the main character seems more fully realized here than in any of the previous books, and none of them were half-bad either. The ending of the book left me wanting to get on to the next chapter in the story, and so I think I may linger in Edinburgh just a bit longer.