Knots and Crosses

Ian Rankin is one of the most popular and respected of the current generation of British crime writers but until now I had never read any of his work or seen more than a brief glimpse of a TV adaptation. Rankin has written about a dozen Rebus investigations and it seemed to me the obvious thing was to start with number one entitled Knots and Crosses where Detective Sergeant John Rebus is chasing a serial killer. In modern detective stories one murder is no longer sufficient to tickle the taste buds of the reader nothing less than a minor massacre will do. The key to the investigation lies in Rebus' own past in the British Army's elite SAS regiment realisation of which places even greater pressure on a man already carrying enough psychological burdens. Rebus has the obligatory prickly relationship with his superiors and inspires mixed reactions from his colleagues, he is a lone wolf in an organisation were team work is the aim. I must admit that I approached this book with a certain amount of trepidation as the "gritty" style of modern writers is so different from that of my favourite authors but I devoured this at one sitting carried by a powerful narrative flow. Rankin's reputation is well earned.