The taunting messages are all pieces of the puzzle that are supposed to lead Rebus to the murderer. At the same time, he begins to receive anonymous notes accompanied by a knot of string or a matchstick crucifix. In this first novel, Rebus is transferred to work on a disturbing case where teenage girls, the same age as his own daughter, are being murdered. Rankin allows us into the complex life and mind of Rebus, and this is part of the main attraction: this and a glimpse into the grimy underworld of Scottish crime away from the romanticised tourist haunts of Edinburgh. Such is our affection for this gritty, over-drinking, over-smoking, relationship nightmare: a man of high moral fibre, but equally corresponding self-loathing. The Rebus series is legendary: so popular, in fact, that when Rankin announced that he would be retiring Rebus from active duty, a member of the Scottish parliament requested that the retirement age for detectives be extended so as to keep Rebus on the force and on the bookstore shelves for a little longer. In the same way that you can’t judge a book by its cover, so shouldn’t you judge it by the number of pages it contains. At just over 200 pages, Knots and Crosses is by no means huge, but it’s astonishing that a considerable number of reviewers for Rankin’s first Rebus novel think that the length of a novel is actually commensurate with its quality.
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