Ian Rankin: The Falls

By MICHELE HEWITSON

If Ian Rankin writes like an angel - and he does - it's an angel with a voice coated in the tar of too many cigarettes and peat-laden from too many nips of too much whisky too late at night.

The Falls is the author's 15th novel in the Inspector Rebus series. With each book he's peeling back the layers of a man as impenetrable as Edinburgh, the Jekyll and Hyde city, whose secrets beyond the tourist trail Rankin excels at investigating.

Rebus operates on gut feeling (and drink) and when the daughter of a banker goes missing he ferrets out an unlikely connection to the strange, carved dolls in coffins found on an Edinburgh hillside in 1836 and which are now part of the collection at the Museum of Scotland.

It's that seamless mix of history, cracking crime plots and the obsessions of Rankin's Rebus character which make him one of the best in the business.

That said, The Falls is not the very best of Rankin - there's some silly business with an online game of cat and mouse which doesn't quite come off - but he's still a streak in a kilt ahead of most of the rest.

Orion

$37.95