Knots and Crosses - Ian Rankin

Knots and Crosses is the first book in Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series, and it most certainly  introduces John Rebus with a bang. Rebus is, in fact,  presented as such a flawed character here  that it is difficult to imagine a more unlikely main character for a series that is now some twenty-two books long and counting. Inspector Rebus is not a likely candidate to live long enough to collect his pension. 

As Knots and Crosses opens, the 41-year-old Rebus is not a happy man. He is divorced and seldom sees his almost-twelve-year-old daughter anymore. He is a loner with almost zero friends who “resents having to play the part of a normal human animal” and he prefers it that way. He has been an Edinburgh cop for fifteen years but is really going nowhere because of his own behavior and because his fellow cops largely resent his presence on the force. The man is a cynic who has somehow retained his faith in God, although he tempers his belief with a sense of humor about it all. During one particularly boring briefing he thinks, “Perhaps if he stopped praying, God would take the hint and stop being such a bastard to one of his few believers on this near-godforesaken planet.” This is John Rebus – and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ian Rankin

Already overworked and way behind on his present case-load, Rebus is not exactly thrilled to be reassigned to one of the biggest manhunts ever seen in Edinburgh. Little girls are disappearing from around the city without a trace only to have their strangled bodies turn up a few days later. At first, Rebus is just another grunt in the army frantically searching for the killer, but it seems that the killer has something special in mind for the inspector (something that every veteran reader of detective fiction will figure out long before it clicks with Rebus). 

Bottom Line: The mystery part of Knots and Crosses is rather straightforward and reader-solvable but that is not really the point of this one. Instead, Rankin spends more than half the book fully fleshing out the John Rebus character. We learn who Rebus is today and all about how he got to be the way he is. We learn about his family history and his strained relationship with his only brother, a stage-hypnotist who followed in their father’s footsteps. We learn about Rebus’s military career and how that will impact the rest of the man’s life. We learn who John Rebus is, and by the end of the book, we know that we want to see a whole lot more of him.