The missing girls are so forgotten about that I still couldn’t tell you any of their names. But the story, as a crime story, is well nigh non-existent.

(Thus confirming my general belief that the first book in any series is often the weakest, and it’s often better to jump in around the third or fourth and then work backwards.) The quality of the writing is already here – Rankin could already evoke Edinburgh in all its contrasts of wealth and poverty, the powerful and the marginalised. I’m very glad that I didn’t originally read this series in order because, to be honest, had I read this book first I doubt very much whether I would have gone on to read any of the others. Apparently Rankin hadn’t originally intended it to become a series – he wrote this as a one-off, as an examination of a damaged man, suffering from PTSD following his experiences in the SAS. This is the first book in what became the long-running Rebus series, and it is very different in style from the way the series developed later. Soon the discovery of the bodies of the girls makes the case even more serious, and the race is on to find the killer before any more girls go missing Three young girls have been abducted from the streets of Edinburgh, and Detective Sergeant John Rebus has been assigned to the team investigating the disappearances.

Knots and crosses by ian rankin