Resurrection Men
by Ian Rankin
Summary
John Rebus has thrown a mug of tea at his detective chief superintendent, which is how Edinburgh's most insubordinate inspector lands at Tulliallan, the Scottish police college, on a last chance retraining course with five other unmanageables, the Resurrection Men of the title, career coppers being taught teamwork like remedial schoolboys. Their group exercise is a cold case, the unsolved 1995 murder of a Glasgow gangster, and Rankin's first trick is the course itself: Rebus is not there as a penitent. The tea was staged. He is undercover inside his own punishment, sent to find out whether his classmates were behind an old unsolved theft, and the cold case the instructors have chosen is one Rebus has private reasons to want left cold.
Back in Edinburgh, Siobhan Clarke works the parallel track, the murder of an art dealer that keeps bending toward Big Ger Cafferty, Rebus's lifelong shadow, the gangster whose relationship with the inspector has curdled into something neither owns to. Rankin runs the two investigations toward each other with the series' full machinery, procedure, pubs, the city's layered self, and the Tulliallan chapters double as a study of institutional policing at its most self protective: six men who know where bodies are buried, teaching each other teamwork.
The convergence pays off both plots and deepens the series' longest game, Rebus and Cafferty circling toward whatever their endgame is.
Around four hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the Rebus series at full complexity, the procedural turned inward on the police themselves.
Historical Context & Significance
Resurrection Men won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2004, the American prize arriving thirteen books into the Rebus series and serving as the US market's formal recognition of what Britain already knew: Ian Rankin's Edinburgh sequence had become the definitive modern British procedural, the tartan noir flagship whose sales made their author the tenth bestselling writer in Britain by 2005, accounting for a tenth of all crime fiction sold in the country.
The title's body snatcher echo, Burke and Hare's resurrection trade, is the series' method in miniature, Edinburgh's respectable surface worked loose from its buried history in every volume; the Tulliallan premise drew on the real college, and the police audience's approval of the book's internal politics became part of its lore.
Rebus retired, un retired and aged in real time across the decades following, the Ken Stott Rebus series adapting it as the opener of its fourth season; Rankin's Diamond Dagger and the rest of the honours followed, the Edgar remaining the transatlantic seal.