Inspector Rebus from Edinburgh is a well-respected booze-loving, maverick police officer and is one of many officers working the case. Al contrario, ha llenado algunos huecos personales que no tenía del todo claros, y lo hace con una trama absorbente, muy bien narrada y concluida. Hyde into then-modern Edinburgh, with Rebus as the Jekyll figure (the book implies for a while that Rebus himself is unwittingly the killer) and he put Rebus in the same road, Arden Street, that he himself was living in. The accompanying notes suggests that the Rebus character was slow to take off and struggling author Rankin thought of killing him off.

Considering some of the reviewers' opinions of John Rebus, he's either loved, hated, or merely shrugged off. Right from the start Rankin creates a bleak introspective tone for the novel and his protagonist quite clearly borrowed from Derek Raymond's Factory series, complete with the same Detective Sergeant rank as Raymond's anonymous cop and the same attitude towards his superiors/promotion. And, oh yeah, another symptom is that he blacks out during sex and is either crying when he regains consciousness, or finds himself choking his partner. He was so damaged during TRAINING that he never actually served in Special Services, but he gets all kinds of respect from his fellow cops because of his Special Services background - which is pretty weird since the symptoms of his PTSD makes him a pretty lousy cop. It's not just Rebus that suffers in comparison, the supporting cast are barely worth a mention, cut from the flimsiest of cardboard and relying on cliche, when the story is told from their point of view I lost interest and it doesn't really add anything to the novel except a bigger word count.This hasn’t been a problem, there is a background thread that runs through the series – an army career, a failed marriage and a daughter – but it’s really just background noise to whatever is happening in the current book. And then the messages begin to arrive: knotted string and matchstick crosses – taunting Rebus with pieces of a puzzle only he can solve. Fifteen years, and all he had to show were an amount of self-pity and a busted marriage with an innocent daughter hanging between them. I wasn't completely satisfied with the ending and with the solution of the mystery, for one thing, and I (but this is simply a matter of personal taste) could have done without the hypnosis. When the plot's so simple (in one of the early chapters the killer becomes exasperated that Rebus hasn't identified him yet and we, the readers, can do nothing but nod and despondently shout 'yes, why haven't you?

Surprisingly, there is no evidence that the girls were sexually molested or assaulted; they are simply (if somewhat gruesomely) killed. As the killings continue, and the anonymous letters keep coming, it becomes clear that the murderer has a fixation on Rebus himself.

Detective Sergeant John Rebus works in Edinburgh, Scotland with a love/hate obsession for his job with the police. At the same time Rebus is also receiving anonymous notes which say things like: "THERE ARE CLUES EVERYWHERE" and "FOR THOSE WHO READ BETWEEN THE LINES". I also enjoyed reading about sections that were only hinted at briefly in the television versions such as an emotionally despondent segment where under hypnosis Rebus reflects on his time training for the SAS.