Knots and crosses

A strangler is on the loose in Edinburgh, and he's receiving knotted strings in the post. A crossword clue? He feels like a burnt-out candle, but he's told few people about it. First, he failed the entrance exam for the elite SAS units, then his life with his intellectual wife fell apart, and even among the members of the Edinburgh police force, he isn't exactly a paragon of professional virtue. He still gets on terribly with people, unless you count the occasional sex with the empathetic press officer. And yet, Detective Sergeant John Rebus sinks his teeth into cases with the ferocity of a bull terrier, especially on the edge between night and dawn – and especially in the case of the maniacal strangler of two schoolgirls, a case that has the entire Scottish capital trembling. To top it all off, the pervert is audacious enough to send the detective envelopes with knotted strings, like the ancient Inca post, then adds tied-up matches… But even the seemingly insane actions of a serial killer preying on helpless teenage girls have a cold logic. Once the detective, with the help of an academic, deciphers the crossword-like message addressed to the most terrifying nightmare in Rebus's mind, the modus operandi is soon revealed. It's high time, as two more victims have appeared. And so, in the ancient royal city, in whose grimy alleys Stevenson's schizophrenic Hyde once roamed, everything is set for the culmination of a meditation on the crooked paths of the soul, crime, and punishment. The first case for the hard-nosed John Rebus, whose beat is the Scottish underworld of the eighties. Will he solve it before his own daughter ends up in the fiend's clutches, before he's crucified by reporters, and most importantly: before his own past finally catches up with him? “If anything is deeply rooted in Rebus, it is stubbornness. This wonderful Scottish quality, quietly and doggedly reshaping a stagnant world, has moulded him into a character that is complex, determined, merciless, yet just – and also proud that in his pursuit of criminals, he lacks the slightest shred of charm, for that was something detectives flaunted more in the glamour era.” – London Review of Books “The most remarkable thing about the intricate hunt for a serial killer, who takes brutal revenge on the throats of girls and leaves cryptic symbols behind, is how the focused investigator with mental trauma just keeps quietly smouldering, as if he doesn't even need to ignite…” – crimefictioncritic.com “Inspector Rebus (…) is a thorn in the side of many around him (…) with his approach to investigations, and not without reason at times. But he is simply his own man, and with the nature of a ram, he won't rest until he steps on the real perpetrator's toes.” – from Czech reviews of the series adaptation “Edinburgh slept on, just as it had slept for hundreds of years. Ghosts moved in the cobbled alleyways and up the winding staircases of the Old Town's tenements, but they were enlightened ghosts, orderly and respectful. They wouldn't jump a man with a ligature ready in hand. Rebus stopped and looked around. Besides, it was morning now, and any god-fearing ghost would be tucked up in bed (…) and quite close by, a police car was dozing, its crew unable to do anything at all, except curse the mountains of rules and regulations and mourn the deep chasms of crime. Crime is everywhere you look. It is a life force and blood and the stuff of life: to cheat, to infiltrate surreptitiously, to deceive, to kill. The higher a person climbs with the help of criminal practices, the more subtly they begin to slide back towards legitimacy, until no one can get a handle on them, except a handful of lawyers – and they can always be bought, they're just waiting with their hands out. Dostoevsky knew all this, the cunning bastard. It didn't escape him that the candle burns at both ends.” – excerpt from the text