A student has gone missing in Edinburgh - completely out of character. She's not just any student, though, but the daughter of extremely well-to-do and influential bankers. There's almost nothing to go on until Detective Inspector John Rebus gets an unmistakable gut feeling that there's more to this than just another runaway spaced out on unaccustomed freedom or worse. Two leads emerge: a carved wooden doll in a toy coffin, found in the student's home village, and an Internet role-playing game. The ancient and the modern, brought together by uncomfortable circumstance and a curmudgeonly detective happier with long playing records than digital technology ...In this powerful novel, Rankin, who 'moves dialogue with the precision of a chess-master', (Irish Times) brings together past, present and future in a terrifying duel of good - in the persons of DI Rebus and DC Siobhan Clarke - and evil.
This book took me forever to get through. It’s the 12th book in the Rebus series, but the first one I’ve read. Rankin is Scottish, and the book is set in Edinburgh, so there was a lot of language that I wasn’t familiar with which made the reading a bit slow. It felt very dense.
Storywise, I guess it wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t really crazy about any of the characters, but I didn’t hate them. I just didn’t relate. I thought I had the “whodunit” figured out early, but I was WRONG. So that’s good, at least. It wasn’t predictable.
The acceptableness of the story aside, I probably won’t seek out any more in this series. I like my crime novels to be a faster read.
