A Heart Full of Headstones

May 1, 2022

Four-time CWA dagger claimant Rankin returns with the next chiller starring tough-guy Edinburgh detective John Rebus. No plot details yet, but there's a 60,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from August 1, 2022
Edgar winner Rankin’s outstanding 24th John Rebus novel (after 2020’s A Song for the Dark Times) opens dramatically with the Edinburgh detective, officially retired but still working, in the dock charged with a crime that’s not revealed until the very end. Flashbacks show familiar characters from Rebus’s world pursuing various agendas. Organized crime kingpin Morris “Big Ger” Cafferty, an old adversary of the detective, asks Rebus to find a man he wronged, but Rebus still has eyes on taking down Cafferty. Det. Insp. Siobhan Clarke, a former colleague of Rebus’s, is investigating a policeman accused of domestic abuse who threatens to expose a culture of police corruption (“Skeletons are about to come tumbling out of closets”). Malcolm Fox, a loathsome, ambitious detective inspector, wants to contain that threat’s collateral damage. Every thread leads to murder. The well-constructed plot is matched by brooding, atmospheric prose (Rebus has “spent his whole life in... a city perpetually dark, feeling increasingly weighed down, his heart full of headstones”). This is one of Rankin’s best Rebus novels in years. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary.

October 15, 2022
Criminal Investigation Department pensioner John Rebus is lured from forced retirement by the world's most unlikely client. Wheelchair-bound Morris Gerald Cafferty, known by every criminal in Edinburgh as Big Ger, feels uncharacteristically guilty over the pressure he put on Jack Oram, who managed the Potter's Bar for Cafferty and helped himself liberally to the till before vanishing four years ago. Now that he's heard rumors Oram's back in town, he'd like his old nemesis to track the embezzler down so that Cafferty could have a word with him. Initially incredulous, Rebus agrees to poke around. Meanwhile, Rebus' old mate DI Siobhan Clarke is looking for another missing person--Cheryl Haggard, who has enough scars to present convincing evidence against her husband, Francis, a uniformed cop accused of domestic violence. Clarke's old frenemy DI Malcolm Fox, a hotshot who's vaulted into the Specialist Crime Division, wants her investigation shut down before Francis Haggard can retaliate by implicating half his fellow officers on the Tynecastle force. When Francis takes the dilemma out of Clarke's hands by going AWOL and turning up conveniently stabbed to death, everything's resolved--except for all those accusations about the Tynecastle constabulary, and the fate of the dead-or-alive Jack Oram, and what looks increasingly like a revolving door between Edinburgh's criminal establishment and Edinburgh's finest. Rebus and Clarke soon establish connections between his case and hers, but that unsurprising news is only the beginning of a series of detonations, figurative and literal, that will ultimately land Rebus, as a teasing prologue shows, standing in the dock himself. Two years after his checkered hero's last outing, Rankin makes you feel the wait was worth every day, whatever comes next.

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September 1, 2022

Rankin doesn't disappoint with book 24 in his Edinburgh-set Rebus series (following A Song for the Dark Times). Retired cop John Rebus is on the wrong side of the courtroom this time--on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. Could "retired" gangster Big "Ger" Cafferty have played a part? Rebus is drawn again into a web of crime-filled Edinburgh. Cafferty orders Rebus to locate a former employee who absconded with a huge sum of Ger's money, but had long since disappeared, presumed dead. Word on the street has Jack Oram very much alive and last seen at a local lettings office. Not buying Ger's reasons for the search, but because long-standing debts must be paid, Rebus sets out. Meanwhile, Rebus's long-suffering pal and prot�g�e D.I. Siobhan Clarke investigates the murder of a fellow police officer who was found dead in a flat managed by the same lettings office. As Rebus and Clarke follow their separate paths, their cases intertwine. Prior misdeeds of Rebus and his contemporaries surface as the investigation continues. VERDICT For the many fans of Rebus and those who enjoy gritty Scottish noir.--Susan Santa

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Starred review from October 1, 2022
As the pas de deux between now-retired Edinburgh copper John Rebus and his longtime nemesis, gangster Big Ger Cafferty, inches closer to its final act, the stakes continue to grow. This twenty-fourth installment in the celebrated series begins with Rebus on trial, but for what? The answer comes eventually, but not until a series of flashbacks details Rebus' latest sparring match with the now-wheelchair-using Cafferty, who initiates the proceedings by trying to hire Rebus to track down a former pub owner with whom Big Ger wants to mend fences. Or does he? Rebus accepts the assignment but only as a way of figuring out what's really on Cafferty's mind. Meanwhile, Rebus' former prot�g�, Siobhan Clarke, is investigating a murder that may connect with a group of dirty cops, with whom Rebus had dealings over the decades. Is this the piece of dirty laundry that will finally put the perpetually rule-breaking Rebus in the crosshairs of management house cleaners? The aging of maverick detectives has become a poignant theme in today's crime fiction, with Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch joining Rebus in an effort to keep solving one more case as a way of "stirring dull roots with spring rain," as Eliot puts it in "The Waste Land." Rankin captures both the heroism and the pathos of that ultimately doomed quest in this cleverly constructed and deeply moving novel.

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