underside of Edinburgh
Remember the G8 conference and the tube/bus bombings in London? Inspector Rebus' latest case revolves around those incidents, which captured the attention of the world. In addition to the hellacious security problems, Rebus is faced with the death of his brother, a serial killer, the apparent suicide of an MP, and the death of a local politician. The higher ups have had it with him anyway, and forbid him to rock the boat while the eyes of the world are upon Edinburgh.

Rebus and his protege, Inspector Siobhan Clark, aren't the type to just let things go, and they forge ahead, under the radar, regardless of what the chief constable thinks. They lose their way quite a few times, and it when they finally figure out what's what, they are astonished. Author Rankin brings his readers on a crawl through Edinburgh, from the richest to the seamiest, from the powerful to the punks. Nothing cozy here, nothing fancy, just gritty, dogged, intelligent police work. And real, multidimensional characters.

Naming of the Dead is worth a second perusal, just to pick up on all the missed cues and clues. Great crime fiction.

MODUS IN REBUS
How you rate this Inspector Rebus story may depend to some extent on what you think of the solution to the mystery, which is obviously something a reviewer ought not to give away. On the other hand it will take you nearly 500 very enjoyable pages before you get there. So far as this reader is concerned, there is nothing much wrong with the solution. I can't persuade myself that it is the job of a detective story to turn out like a factual police investigation in real life, and although the outcome should not be preposterous it ought to be imaginative, and it is imaginative here.

I have no idea whether Ian Rankin belongs to the Agatha Christie school of whodunit plotting, or to the Raymond Chandler school. We know from Chandler himself that he wrote most of his Marlowe tales without knowing who the murderer was: Mrs Christie was not so forthcoming so far as I am aware, but surely she must have had the final denouements in mind from the outset and structured the rest of it round them so that we can be as amazed as the respectful and silent gatherings who listen to Poirot or Miss Marple explaining all over ten or a dozen pages. Where Rankin seems to me to side with Chandler is in making the rest of the story and the characterisation more significant in their own right than they are in the solution-focused Christie style, and I find that to my own liking. In fact this is the first Rebus story I have ever read, but it will not be the last. The glum, dogged and cantankerous old corner-cutter is getting on in years, now within a year of compulsory retirement and obviously facing a bleak outlook when that comes, as there is nothing much in his life except the job. His portrayal is sympathetic and quite convincing if not exactly delineated in as much depth as Hamlet, so is that of his oppo Siobhan Clarke, and convincing also, if less sympathetic, is that of the other main players. The storyline is absolutely excellent in my own opinion, and it held my interest completely through what is quite a long book. Rankin has true storytelling technique, the result of experience as well as of talent. Links between episodes are very artfully done and if one's attention wanders at all it is liable to mean rereading a couple of paragraphs. The background in July 2005 - the Gleneagles summit of the G8, the British Olympics bid for 2012 and the 7/7 bombings in London - is inspired, and the scene-setting in the author's native Edinburgh is as authentic as we would expect. The writing is of high quality, but in case anyone was wondering, a `rammy' is a fight and `Shug' is `Hugh'.

One detail in particular has not worked out in quite the way Rankin obviously expected, and Mr Blair's brainwave of obtaining `loans' rather than donations to the Labour party (the idea being to avoid declaration) blew back in his face in spectacular fashion. This very excusable misprognostication does affect the credibility of one aspect of the final outcome, I suppose, but at the end of the day this is fiction, and the historical backdrop is very convincing by and large. I don't believe I would have wanted the story to resemble the miserable real-life murder investigations that I have become all too familiar with. There is an appropriate standard for different kinds of things, or `Est modus in rebus' as they say in the Classics, and that suits me very well provided the narrator is good enough at his job. I was sorry to come to the end of this book. Dear old Rebus may be bowing out, but I have all his previous adventures to get to know, and I am looking forward to it.

Receives James Gale's award-winning voice
Ian Rankin's THE NAMING OF THE DEAD receives James Gale's award-winning voice and theatre training as it tells of Inspector Rebus, who begins work on a simple suicide case during a pre-conference dinner at Edinburgh Castle and finds his probe leads to some dangerous and unexpected venues of higher power and murder. Politics and drama come to life in this audio drama, a recommended pick for any collection strong in audio murder thrillers.

Decent; 3.5 Stars
The latest installment in a long-running series featuring the alcoholic policeman and outsider John Rebus. This is another variation of the classic Raymond Chandler device of an alienated hero who is an obsessive seeker of the truth. In this case, set in the mildly exotic locale of Edinburgh. This book is as much about Rebus' partner, Siobhan Clarke, as Rebus himself, and deals with issues of revenge and temptation. Rebus' long time gangster nemesis makes an appearance. The quality of writing is above average. The plot, however, is excessively complex with a somewhat strained ending.

Rebus Is On The Case
"The Naming of The Dead," by Ian Rankin, current, highly-successful dean of Scottish mystery writers, is 18th in his "tartan noir" Detective Inspector John Rebus series, and is set in and around the beautiful-to-the-tourist, but not necessarily to the locals, east coast Scots city of Edinburgh. It takes place in July, 2005; Rebus's younger brother Michael, of whom we occasionally heard, has just died at 54, victim, Rebus proposes, of "Scotland's mortality rate that of a Third World nation. Lifestyle, diet, genes - plenty of theories."

The Group of Eight (G8) summit, of political and economic leaders of the most industrialized eight countries, is set to open in the famous golfing resort of Gleneagles, near Edinburgh. Leaders as diverse and famous as American President George Bush, British Prime minister Tony Blair, and Russian premier Putin are about to converge here, and all the British intelligence services, particularly Edinburgh's, and its police brass, are determined to keep a lid on things. They've warned off trouble-making Rebus, and buried him as far from the action as they can. But crowds of protesters, led by Sir Bob Geldorf, record industry figure/philanthropist; Bono, lead singer of the Irish band U2, and Bianca Jagger are coming too. The last thing they want to do is keep the lid on.

Then Ben Webster, British cabinet undersecretary, dies in a mysterious fall from his hotel room. It could be murder, and it could be suicide, and, suddenly, Rebus and his protégé, DI Siobhan Clarke, are on the scene, too, much to the horror of the mighty. Furthermore, there's soon another, apparently interconnected, serial murder case: someone's killing off really unpleasant sex offenders. Rebus and Clarke are on the case, no two ways about it; the brass is really unhappy.

This book is, unfortunately, complex and confusing. Rankin's reportage on the G8 summit is accurate and vivid: furthermore, we get the -imagined-- pleasure of watching a hung-over Rebus knock President Bush off his bike. Then, towards the end, Rebus veers off into the horrific London underground bombings that also happened that July, killing more than 50 people. I consider myself an intelligent reader, but I've no idea why he felt it necessary to do that. Any serious author wants to extend his skills; but the Politics and Current Affairs books are on whole different shelves, aren't they? The music books too, come to that. And when reviewers talk about a mystery transcending its genre, I worry.

However, the mystery as such is quite passable; the characterizations of the major characters, Rebus, Clarke, and Morris Gerald (Big Jer) Cafferty, Edinburgh's crime czar, continue to be enriched. The author can still deliver that city in lively, accurate detail. At one point, he discusses an Edinburgh neighborhood, "Once an area of breweries and factories, where Sean Connery had spent his early years, Fountainbridge was changing. The old industries had all but vanished. The city's financial district was encroaching. Style bars were opening. One of Rebus's favourite old watering-holes had already been demolished, and he reckoned the bingo hall next door - the Palais de Danse as was -- would soon follow. The canal, not much more than an open sewer at one time, had been cleaned up. Families would go there for bike rides, or to feed the swans."

Or: "The City Chambers had been built on top of a plague street called Mary King's Close. Years back, Rebus had investigated a murder in the dank underground labyrinth - Cafferty's own son the victim. The place had been tidied up and now was a tourist haunt in the summer." Guilty as charged; tourist, me. I do love Rankin's work, and a few years ago, did make a pilgrimage to Edinburgh, where I found the relevant tour, right under the City Hall.