I have been trying to work out why I find these books so compulsive and satisfying.
These two are numbers 13 and 14 in the whole sequence and I am only about half way through. If I hold onto my plan to ration myself, then I will still have new stories to enjoy for several years to come.
Our hero (slightly tongue in cheek description!) is John Rebus. He constantly lives up to the meaning of his surname: rebus; an enigmatic puzzle. In ‘Resurrection Men’ he has been sent to Tulliallan Police College outside Edinburgh for a period of ‘retraining.’ John Rebus is always over stepping the mark, though always, well nearly always, for the right reasons. He and his fellow reprobates are given a cold case to work on. The problem is that it resonates with Rebus in a way that causes him to suspect the other officers with whom he is supposed to be collaborating. Rather inevitably this brings danger to himself as well as his detective sergeant Siobhan.
Geographically and topologically, Edinburgh is layered. Buildings, over the centuries, were literally built on top of each other and Ian Rankin’s stories mirror this. He gives us a recreation of the tourist postcard of the city but his writing takes us deeper into the dirty, dangerous underbelly of Edinburgh, which thankfully most of us will never experience.
In ‘A Question of Blood’ Rebus has scalded hands, bad enough for hospitalisation, and he refuses to explain the situation. A criminal who has been threatening his colleague Siobhan, has been killed in a house fire. Rebus admits he was there earlier in the evening and there is the question of the hands. Scalds … or burns? The narrative rolls on with the typical tight plotting that Rankin employs in all these books. Interestingly this is the first example (I think) of any suggestion of a personal relationship between Rebus and Siobhan but as the book ends that still hangs tantalisingly in the air; unfinished, undecided.
As for the scalded hands? Well, in the end the answer is quite simple and maybe Rebus was too ashamed to explain. However, that conundrum kept me hooked throughout the book and was quite essential to the storyline. I can sometimes feel quite battered when I finish one of these books … but in a good way! It’s because I have been swallowed up by the grimy side of Edinburgh and at the end I can surface again.