Knots and Crosses   by Ian Rankin

The first one, the book which kicked off the entire Rebus series.

A killer is on the loose, who, it turns out, only wants to get to Rebus. He kills a series of apparently unrelated girls, and their names are an acrostic for that of Rebusʼ own daughter. He kidnaps her but keeps her as his bait for Rebus.

Rebusʼ brother happens to be a theatrical hypnotist, and agrees to put Rebus under in an attempt to solve the mystery of the crime of which Rebus is convinced the solution is hiding in this mind. And so the story of Rebus in the army comes out, and so too does the murderer.

It turns out that the culprit is now working in the childrenʼs section of Edinburgh library, where the final showdown takes place.

The ending is a bit peculiar. Tension is strangely missing, and the whole thing is poorly drawn out. It is almost as if the villain is being deliberately let away. Rebus is shot solidly in the shoulder, but soldiers on to the end.

The plotting, though, is very clever and very tight. Rebusʼ back-story, told when he is under the hynotist, is extremely well written.

The book doesn’t quite give Edinburgh the same character that later books do, and the personal interactions donʼt feel quite so intimate as in the later works.

The best aspect of the book, which does of course become a hallmark of Rankinʼs style, is the development of the characters, even if their interactions here are slightly lacking, slightly wooden compared with later instalments.

Rebus is introduced as a man who got an honourable discharge from the army (though no-one initially knows the backstory) which helped him get a job with the Edinburgh Police Service. The book does not give him the camaraderie he shares with his peers in later volumes, and does not put him in the atmospheric setting so well as the later ones.

The woman is the least well developed, and gains an unnatural familiarisation with Rebus very quickly (sex helps!). She is the one that drives the hypnotist to dig into Rebusʼ army past, though it is not obvious why she is so bothered by this at this stage.

Rebusʼ brother comes across as a very convenient prop to the story. He mostly hides himself away form Rebus, and is portrayed as very ostentatious but living in fear of the drug lords who are controlling him.

Rebusʼ boss is portrayed rather typically as overbearing who likes to push people around and give the boring jobs to people he dislikes such as Rebus, but at the same time he has a quiet admiration of Rebusʼ abilities and the results he gets. The book starts with them having a difficult and barely affable relationship, but then when the killer kills the bossʼ son as an accidental casualty and it becomes clear the killer is after Rebusʼ daughter, the two become close and start cuddling each other.

The newspaper man is the best developed, and is made to parallel Rebus in many ways. He was once in a relationship with Rebusʼ new lover, hence is slightly sour but enjoys looking over Rebusʼ shoulder in that respect. He is painted as a character very similar to Rebus himself: a single man subsisting on take-away food and beer, whose job is his life and who grudgingly acknowledges his place in the world and that of others around him, that the world is the way it is and he cannot change it.

The daughter is estranged, a twelve-year old with whom he has recent scant little contact. While she ends up being central to the story and we get to feel for her, she is kept only as an instrument in the construction of the backbone of this story.

Both the opening and ending are quite weak, and on the whole I would probably have missed this author if it had been my first read of his. (Of course I jumped into the series in the middle, and despite crime not being my favourite genre Iʼve ended up reading more by this author than any other; most of the books are simply unputdownable.)