The Hanging Garden / Dead Souls

Inspector Rebus #9-10

by Ian Rankin

A Bumper Omnibus Edition:
Dead Souls AND Hanging Garden

895 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

About the author

AKA Jack Harvey.

Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987; the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents.

Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.

A contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, on Channel 4 in 2002. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, and opted to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/ianrankin

Reviews

[Niklas Angmyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I needed to read an anglosaxian criminal novel to wash away the dull experience from a Nordic criminal novel. Rankin is not my first choice but this book was handy. The hero, Rebus, works several parallell crime stories and of course he do it with some ruthlessness towards collegues, villains, witnesses and victims. Expressed in another way, Rebus is the usual vacillation police hero. It is to much of Rebus inner life in these books according to me. But what I like is that from a theme, f ex missing persons, Rankin twines different aspects of this theme into the story. The novels then becomes quite subtle and fine tuned.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back to back Rebus. Great for a flight and a long Summer Shabbat, but not good for much else. He's still good at plot, but hopeless at dialog and mostly really annoying.