Rebus has ten days do go when Alexander Todorov, a Russian poet, is brutally murdered after a reading.

Accordingly, this book finds Rebus in the autumn of the year and of his career as well. Rebus was already nearly sixty years old before his creator was stunned to discover that sixty was the mandatory retirement age for detectives in Scotland. This is the seventeenth and allegedly last book in Ian Rankin's excellent series featuring Edinburgh Inspector John Rebus. Moving on now to the next book to see how well Rebus is coping with retirement. There was a lot of humour too in the relationship and dialogue between Rebus and Siobhan. It was long but it powered along with a series of events and lots of police work.

I was delighted with myself when I guessed one of the attackers very early in the piece but it might have been because I did not like the character and wanted it to be him! Of course he redeems himself at the last moment.

In Exit Music Rebus is working his final week before retirement and only he could manage to get himself suspended from duty in his last few days. He is also very smart and sees connections between events long before anyone else does. He takes no nonsense from anyone, largely prefers to work on his own, or at least with just DS Clarke, and by the age of sixty is growing increasingly cranky with life and everything. Now of course we know it was far from the final book about Rebus, thank goodness! Written as though it was possibly the last in a long and excellent series.

He recently received the OBE for services to literature, and opted to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.Ī contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, on Channel 4 in 2002. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987 the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents. Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature.

Lauren rowe the club flirt