A Song for the Dark Times (Inspector John Rebus Series #23)

by Ian Rankin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Although Ian Rankin's Inspector John Rebus is retired, we know that the best of the best can never resist being pulled back in. We also know that when family is involved, we can't say no. Rebus has aged over the course of 23 novels. We've grown with him. How can WE say no to this emotional and raw procedural?

"He’s gone…"
 
When his daughter Samantha calls in the dead of night, John Rebus knows it’s not good news. Her husband has been missing for two days.
 
Rebus fears the worst – and knows from his lifetime in the police that his daughter will be the prime suspect.
 
He wasn’t the best father – the job always came first – but now his daughter needs him more than ever.  But is he going as a father or a detective?
 
As he leaves at dawn to drive to the windswept coast – and a small town with big secrets – he wonders whether this might be the first time in his life where the truth is the one thing he doesn’t want to find…

A thrilling new Rebus novel about crime, punishment, and redemption, from the Edgar Award-winning "genius" of the genre (Lee Child, bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316479233
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Series:	Inspector John Rebus Series , #23
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	116,449
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ian Rankin is a #1 international bestselling author. Winner of an Edgar Award and the recipient of a Gold Dagger for fiction and the Chandler-Fulbright Award, he lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons.

Hometown:

Edinburgh, London and France

Date of Birth:

April 28, 1960

Place of Birth:

Cardenden, Scotland

Education:

Edinburgh University

Website:

http://www.ianrankin.net

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/17/2020

Edgar winner Rankin’s excellent 23rd outing for John Rebus (after 2019’s In a House of Lies) takes the retired police inspector from Edinburgh to a remote part of northern Scotland, where his daughter Samantha’s partner, Keith Grant, the father of his school-age granddaughter, has vanished. In his search for Keith, Rebus visits a local commune and—of particular interest to Keith—the ruins of a camp built during WWII that held captured German soldiers. An entitled landowner he runs across complicates his quest. Back in Edinburgh, former colleague Siobhan Clarke investigates the murder of Salman bin Mahmoud, a wealthy 23-year-old Saudi. The high-profile case draws in such familiar characters as criminal Morris Gerald Cafferty and Malcolm Fox, the smarmy, ambitious detective introduced in 2009’s The Complaints. As the two plots converge, the various credible, complex backstories coalesce into a highly satisfying and unified whole. This fresh entry boasts the kind of storytelling that made Rankin famous. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for IN A HOUSE OF LIES


"There's no one like Ian Rankin for bringing us right into the world of detectives. For anyone who's fascinated by the inner workings of that world, and all its tricky, brutal, expert ruthlessness, In A House of Lies is a must-read."—Tana French

"Loved In A House Of Lies. How does Rebus keep on getting better and better? Ian Rankin is a genius."—Lee Child

"Rather Be the Devil will not disappoint - in the last 30 pages or so, Rankin delivers so many shocking but satisfying twists I felt I might have whiplash."—Tampa Bay Times

"One of the best things in crime fiction for years, but Rankin kicks it up several notches here."

—Booklist (Starred Review)

From the Publisher

05/01/2020

The first mystery Banville has written under his own name, rather than as Benjamin Black, Snow stars a crusty Protestant detective investigating a murder in County Wexford, buried in endless Snow. In Carlyle's debut, The Girl in the Mirror, jealous Iris takes over the identity—and the handsome husband—of golden-girl twin sister Summer, who mysteriously disappears from a yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean (100,000-copy first printing). In House of Correction, French's new stand-alone, back-in-town Tabitha is arrested for murder when a dead body is found in her shed, and given her pill-popping history of depression and faded recollections of the day, she starts wondering if she really is guilty (50,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Jewell's Invisible Girl, virginal 30-year-old geography teacher Owen Pick is suspended from his job for sexual misconduct he denies, ends up on a shady online involuntary celibate forum, and eventually is a suspect in a teenager's disappearance (250,000-copy first printing). Molloy follows up her New York Times best-selling The Perfect Mother with Goodnight Beautiful, about newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter, who have moved to his quiet upstate New York hometown as he pursues his career as a therapist, though, dangerously, his sessions are heard by neighbors through a ceiling vent (100,000-copy first printing). A Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner and finalist for multitudinous awards, Neville collects short crime, horror, and speculative fiction (some new to print) in The Traveller and Other Stories, a cogent example of Northern Irish noir. With Death and the Maiden, Norman wraps up mother Ariana Franklin's 1100s England-set series about Adelia Aguilar, Mistress of the Art of Death, with an original story about Adelia's daughter, Allie, investigating when several girls go missing from a village she is visiting (40,000-copy first printing). The protean Oates offers four masterly, never-before-published novellas, exemplified by the titular story in Cardiff by the Sea, whose protagonist rediscovers past tragedy when she inherits a house in Maine from someone she doesn't know. In Patterson/Serafin's Three Women Disappear, a mob accountant who is the nephew of the don of central Florida is fatally stabbed in his own kitchen, and which of three women—his wife, his maid, or his personal chef—might be responsible (500,000-copy first printing)? Rankin's A Song for Dark Times witnesses the returns of Inspector Rebus (50,000-copy first printing). In The Devil and the Dark Water, Turton's follow-up to the top LibraryReads pick, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, famed detective Samuel Pipps is sailing back to Amsterdam in chains when terrifying events assault the crew, Pipps's sidekick vanishes, and Pipps himself is asked to puzzle out what's happening.

Library Journal

When retired police inspector John Rebus gets a phone call from his daughter, Samantha, to say her husband is missing, he makes the journey to the north coast of Scotland to support her. Things quickly get complicated when Samantha becomes a suspect in the disappearance and another murder enquiry is being investigated by his old team in Edinburgh. James Macpherson is the perfect narrator for this mystery. His rich Scottish brogue immediately transports the listener to the wilds of Scotland while creating a wonderfully curmudgeonly Rebus. Macpherson’s accomplished narration creates believable characters ranging from streetwise villains to world-weary police officers. He seamlessly moves between the characters’ quick-fire dialogue, and his clear differentiation makes the characters easy to identify for newcomers to the series. K.J.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile