Customer Reviews

Knots and Crosses

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Someone is strangling children in Edinburgh. Inspector John Rebus starts receiving what he thinks are crank letters, each enclosing a small neatly tied knot. While investigating the serial strangler, Rebus takes the reader with him on a tour of the seedy side of Scotland's second city. Along the way we learn that Rebus has lost his marriage, has forgotten how to communicate with his young daughter, drinks too much and feels and acts the loner. We meet the other detectives and minor characters that flesh out the story so well. While Rebus starts to see where all the clues are pointing, the reader is completely drawn into the story. Rankin set out to write a modern day parallel to Jekyll and Hyde, not a crime fiction book at all. But the result is the beginning of the best mystery series I've yet to read. Inspector Rebus is fascinating enough to carry a book by himself, but the mystery is absorbing, thought-provoking and makes this book a fast paced page turner. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Ian Rankin has penned a masterpiece with this series. I hope you will read them all.

The first book by Ian Rankin and the first to feature Inspector John Rebus. I must admit to being more interested in good characters than clever story lines but this has both. Rebus is a fascinatingly human protaganist who you just want to find out more about. Fortunatley there are a dozen Rebus novels in which to get to know him better.
Well worth the read.

What can one write about Rankin? The creator of Inspector Rebus? This is one in his long series of Rebus novels and of course it is intriguing and great. It's not the best of his novels, my favorite is "Black & Blue" to date, but they are all really great mysteries.

I hated this book. At least fifteen people must have recommended Rankin to me, but I found the prose sludgy and the plot generally uninteresting, and, as in other of his books, hard to keep track of. He has a formula he doesn't seem to deviate from: an interesting murder (usually) is described and after that, the characters, who are really stock figures, set about figuring out what happened while doom and gloom swirls about Edinburgh. He uses the trick of trying to make the main character sympathetic by making him a maverick while the other benighted police personnel fail to understand his superior ability. So do I. He seems barely human.

His books tend to be quite long. After reading two of them, and realizing I could have reread Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or Alice in Wonderland, or just about anything, I was completely fed up with myself for having wasted the time. I lent the book to someone else who said it wasn't as terrible as I thought it was but he wouldn't read another book of his. Why all the fuss?

Interesting. I had heard of Rankin in passing but I watched an interview with him in July. I had to give him a try. Knots and Crosses shows that it is his first major work. There are some flaws to the story and the flow, especially in the beginning. But at some point, it grabs you and won't let go. I had to read 2/3 of the book today because I was interested in seeing where the plot twists.

While K&C may not be much more than basically formulaic on many levels, I enjoyed the realism of the characters. Certainly, in a shorter work, it is difficult to establish too much complexity or red herrings. I enjoyed the idea that the main character was solving the crime more by accident than by effort. As a novel outside the genre, I think it is a very worthy effort at combining characterization and plot. For those of you who view it as a not too clever example of the genre, maybe you should read something else for a while and freshen up.

Very much worth the money, esp if you intend to read the later books.

Great effort Ian and much fun!

-Mike

Recent installments of the Rebus series (Black & Blue, Dead Souls and Set in Darkness) have garnished a fair amount of critical acclaim and awards. I thought I'd check out the series from the beginning. It may be a long time before I get to the books that won the awards.

Knots & Crosses is a competently written police procedural set in Scotland. It was, at least for me, a bit of chore to read. The bleakness was the difficulty. A nasty child murderer is sought. Rebus is a bit too stereotypical - divorced, alienated, chain smoking loner with a past that the reader has to guess about. With the exception of some tourist info (meaningless to me, having never been there), there just is no relief for the reader. While everything is resolved in the end, the reader doesn't get many clues to chew on in the process of the novel.

Bottom-line: I'd give this two and a half stars if the system allowed. Fans of British police procedurals may like this better but I'd rather read Daziel & Pascoe or Inspector Barnaby.

Lacks the complex, inter-twining plot and characters of his excellent later novels. The plot is a little run of the mill and the resolution predictable.

It does fill in a lot of details about JR's past.

I discovered Ian Rankin while on vacation in Edinburgh. Enjoying reading books set in places I'm visiting, I went into a book store and asked for a good mystery by a Scottish writer set in Edinburgh. Ian Rankin was recommended. Knots and Crosses, his first book, was very good. He is an excellent writer who has a wonderful command of language and literature, and an understanding of human nature. He probably mentioned once too often that there are great differences in the real Edinburgh and the one the tourists see. I'm anxious to read his subsequent mysteries and see if he corrects that flaw. However, I liked that fact that he included enough details about famous sites to keep this tourist entertained.

I have been looking for a good mystery series for months. After reading all of Anne Perry, P. D. James, Elizabeth George, and Martha Grimes, I have been disappointed time after time until I happened upon Ian Rankin's debut novel. John Rebus, the Edinburgh detective at the center of Rankin's series is a very interesting fellow and the plots keep the reader guessing until the end. I'm on my fourth book now and each one just keeps getting better.

Ian Rankin's debut John Rebus procedural has several similarities to John Harvey's Charlie Resnick series, weary, flawed, divorced, mid-level policeman hero, nasty plot (serial killer of little girls), set in a dark British city (Edinburgh). However, Rankin's book doesn't measure up in characterization, plausibility, or even plot to any of Harvey's books. Therefore, I will return my attention to finishing the Harvey books before giving Rankin a second chance.