‘No one would blame you for coasting a bit,’ says Detective Inspector John Rebus’s less charitable colleague. It’s true: Rebus is getting on. He’s staring down the barrel of his sixtieth birthday, compulsory retirement and Scotland’s smoking ban, and his hard drinking, old-fashioned ways are out of step with his modern, politically savvy colleagues’; Rebus is sidelined when the eyes of the world turn on Scotland for the 2005 G8 summit. The only one left in the station when a body is discovered near the venue, Rebus is right in the middle of things, and – of course – rubbing politicians, big business leaders and his superiors up the wrong way in a lock-jawed attempt to unearth the truth about murdered paedophiles and cliff-jumping political aides (or was he pushed?).
The novel’s title was inspired by a ceremony held in Edinburgh in 2005 commemorating those who had died in Iraq, and despite the dramatic, multilayered plotlines, or indeed because of them, the novel is full of introspective brooding melancholy as policemen and women grapple with the awareness that they’ve given it all up – families, lovers, friends, a life – for the job.
This should be the penultimate Rebus novel: the old policeman will be pensioned off in the next. Rankin has already stated that he will not kill off Rebus, however, and he has already promised a subsequent book focusing on Siobhan Clarke, the closest thing Rebus has to a protégé. Just as Rebus keeps getting his man, Rankin keeps not only hitting his mark, but defining it.
