Book Lists

Best Selling Books by Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin is the author of Standing in Another Man's Grave (2013), The Complaints (2011), Resurrection Men, Even Dogs in the Wild, Knots and Crosses.

8 results found

Standing in Another Man's Grave

release date: Jan 15, 2013
Standing in Another Man's Grave
John Rebus returns to investigate the disappearances of three women from the same road over ten years.

For the last decade, Nina Hazlitt has been ready to hear the worst about her daughter's disappearance. But with no sightings, no body, and no suspect, the police investigation ground to a halt long ago, and Nina's pleas to the cold case department have led her nowhere.

Until she meets the newest member of the team: former Detective John Rebus.

Rebus has never shied away from lost causes - one of the many ways he managed to antagonize his bosses when he was on the force. Now he's back as a retired civilian, reviewing abandoned files. Necessary work, but it's not exactly scratching the itch he feels to be in the heart of the action.

Two more women have gone missing from the same road where Sally Hazlitt was last seen. Unlike his skeptical colleagues, Rebus can sense a connection - but pursuing it leads him into the crosshairs of adversaries both old and new.

Rebus may have missed the thrill of the hunt, but he's up against a powerful enemy who's got even less to lose.

On the twentieth anniversary of Ian Rankin's first American publication comes a novel bursting with the vitality and suspense that made its author one of crime fiction's most dazzling stars. STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN'S GRAVE is the triumphant return of John Rebus, and a riveting story of sin, redemption, and revenge.

The Complaints

release date: Mar 01, 2011
The Complaints
Nobody likes The Complaints--they're the cops who investigate other cops. It's a department known within the force as "The Dark Side," and it's where Malcolm Fox works. He's a serious man with a father in a nursing home and a sister who persists in an abusive relationship, frustrating problems about which he cannot seem to do anything.

Then the reluctant Fox is given a new case. There's a cop named Jamie Breck, and he's dirty. The problem is, no one can prove it. As Fox takes on the job, he learns that there's more to Breck than anyone thinks--dangerous knowledge, especially when a vicious murder takes place far too close to home.

In THE COMPLAINTS, Rankin proves again why he is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling crime writers, mixing unstoppable pacing with the deeper question of who decides right from wrong.

Resurrection Men

Resurrection Men
Inspector John Rebus has messed up badly this time, so badly that he's been sent to a kind of reform school for damaged cops. While there among the last-chancers known as "resurrection men," he joins a covert mission to gain evidence of a drug heist orchestrated by three of his classmates. But the group has been assigned an unsolved murder that may have resulted from Rebus's own mistake. Now Rebus can't determine if he's been set up for a fall or if his disgraced classmates are as ruthless as he suspects. When Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke discovers that her investigation of an art dealer's murder is tied to Rebus's inquiry, the two-protÈgÈ and mentor-join forces. Soon they find themselves in the midst of an even bigger scandal than they had imagined-a plot with conspirators in every corner of Scotland and deadly implications about their colleagues. With the brilliant eye for character and place that earned him the name "the Dickens of Edinburgh," Ian Rankin delivers a page-turning novel of intricate suspense.

Even Dogs in the Wild

Even Dogs in the Wild

Rebus comes out of retirement...to save his nemesis.

Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is feeling the heat. She's investigating the death of a senior government prosecutor, David Minton, who has friends in high places. When one of their own is killed, the powers that be want answers fast. But Clarke is puzzled: if Minton died in a robbery as everyone thinks, why is nothing missing from his home? The answer may lie not in what was taken, but in what was left behind at the scene--an ominous note.

Malcolm Fox is feeling useless. Shunned by his colleagues because of his past in the Complaints bureau, he's been reassigned to a grunt detail, helping a surveillance team--one that trusts him even less than his own boss does--track a notorious Glasgow crime family. Helping Clarke with the Minton case is the only thing that makes Fox feel like a real cop.

Newly minted civilian John Rebus is feeling restless. Being a cop is in his blood and he's failing miserably at retirement. So when Clarke and Fox ask for his help, Rebus doesn't need long to consider his options. But before he can get his bearings, a call comes from Rebus's old nemesis--"Big Ger" Cafferty. Someone just fired a bullet through his front window--and sent him a note identical to Minton's. The normally unflappable old gangster is on edge, but for the life of him Cafferty can't figure out who he's wronged. And the only man he trusts with his life is Rebus.

As the cases collide, it's up to Clarke, Fox, and Rebus to connect the dots and save their unlikely ally Cafferty, whose past harbors a shocking secret that implicates Minton's friends in an unspeakable crime. Even Dogs in the Wild reunites crime fiction legend Ian Rankin's greatest characters in an explosive story exploring the darkest corners of our desires.

Knots and Crosses

Knots and Crosses
Edinburgh policeman, John Rebus, must solve murders involving seeming crank letters. He is not the only officer workering the case, but the only one who has all the pieces to resolve it.

Let It Bleed

Let It Bleed

In the dark days and biting windstorms of an Edinburgh winter, two drop-out kids dive off the towering Forth Road Bridge. A civic office is spattered by a grisly gun-blast. Two suicides and a murder that just don't add up, unless John Rebus can crunch the numbers. Following a trail that snakes through stark alleys and sad bars, shredded files and lacerated lives, Rebus finds himself up against an airtight, murderous conglomerate on the make in every arena of power. It's leeching the life and soul out of his city and, if it can, him too...


It may be Inspector Rebus' toughest case ever in Let It Bleed, from brilliant crime writer Ian Rankin.

A Question of Blood

A Question of Blood
When a former soldier and recluse murders two 17-year-old students at a posh Edinburgh boarding school, Inspector John Rebus immediately suspects there is more to the case than meets the eye.

Rather Be the Devil (A Rebus Novel)

Rather Be the Devil (A Rebus Novel)

Rebus investigates a cold case that just turned red hot.

As he settles into an uneasy retirement, Rebus has given up his favorite vices. There's just one habit he can't shake: he can't let go of an unsolved case. It's the only pastime he has left and up until now, it's the only one that wasn't threatening to kill him. But when Rebus starts reexamining the facts behind the long-ago murder of a glamorous woman at a luxurious hotel - on the same night a famous rock star and his entourage where also staying there - the past comes roaring back to life with a vengeance.

And as soon as Rebus starts asking questions about the long forgotten crime, a fresh body materializes. His inquiries reunite him with his old pals-Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox-as they attempt to uncover the financial chicanery behind the savage beating of an upstart gangster, a crime that suggests the notorious old school crime boss Big Ger Cafferty has taken to retirement as poorly as Rebus himself.

As he connects the mysteries of the past to the those of the present, Rebus learns - the hard way - that he's not the only one with an insatiable curiosity about what happened in that hotel room forty years ago, and that someone will stop at nothing to ensure that the crime remains ancient history.

A twisted tale of power, corruption, and bitter rivalries in the dark heart of Edinburgh, Rather Be the Devil showcases Rankin and Rebus at their unstoppable best.
8 results found


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