The series (and author) wouldn’t really fully find its feet and break out to become a mainstream success until the publication of Black and Blue in 1997. However, you can tell it’s a relatively early work by the author: while perfectly well written it’s also rather unspectacular, with Rankin still busy finding his voice. It even comes to a rather jarring over-the-top action climax to the story straight out of a Hollywood movie.ĭespite the age of the novel, there’s nothing in it – save the absence of now-ubiquitous mobile phones – that really dates it. The whodunit aspect is a nice puzzle that keeps the whole novel fundamentally sound, even if it does seem to borrow from similar tales of the time such as Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. It’s the culture clash that feels more central to the novel than the Wolfman investigation, and Rebus also has a number of personal and family distractions to take care of as well.

Rebus hates the capital on sight, and the feeling is entirely mutual with most people that Rebus encounters on the streets of London similarly antagonistic toward him in turn. It’s a somewhat atypical novel in that it’s barely set in Rankin’s native Scotland at all, but rather dispatches Rebus to London to help pursue a serial killer known as the Wolfman. Tooth and Nail was written in 1992 and was Rankin’s third book to star Rebus arguably it’s the first real police procedural since the author had rather different psychological horror intentions with the first stories and was rather surprised to find that he had ended up writing a crime novel. However, despite being an avid reader of crime fiction, I have to confess that much to my chagrin I’d never actually read any of the series – until this month, when a special 99p Kindle offer gave me the opportunity to sample an early Rebus story with minimal financial risk. I learned recently that around a third of all crime genre book sales in the UK are of Ian Rankin’s John Rebus series which is now twenty-strong with the recent publication of the latest instalment Even Dogs in the Wild.

Posted on OctoUpdated on November 1, 2016įor various reasons I’ve still had little opportunity to catch up on television, film or DVD fare suitable for review here, but I have been reading a number of books that are undeniably worthy of brief mention on Taking The Short View… Crime Night: Tooth and Nail by Ian Rankin, The Bat by Jo Nesbø, Ghost in the Machine by Ed James

Tooth and nail rebus