This 2002 novel has recently been issued in audiobook form.  It’s 13^th in the John Rebus series.  Rebus is his usual self, disobeying orders and drinking too much but showing great determination to get to the bottom of the mystery.  In this case, the main mystery is the murder of an art dealer, Edward Marber.  He was unpopular and annoyed many of his clients and customers, so there are many suspects. Detective Sargent Siobhan Clarke has just been promoted, so she is heading the investigation.  Rebus has been forced to go to retraining at a police training center, along with other police who have also got into trouble. So there’s a lot here about Rebus’s ethics and his readiness to conform to the new standards of the police organization. But as the story unfolds we see that Rebus developing suspicions about the honesty of the other police beingaretrained. 

This is a long novel at over 430 pages; the unabridged audiobook is over 14 hours long.  The plot is complicated and arguably could have been simplified to the benefit of the book. But Rebus is pleasing as a main character, and Siobhan also is coming into her own. The performance by James Macpherson is a lot of fun with his mastery of Scottish accents, and plenty of emotion in his reading.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York