Ian Rankin

Author Information
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  • Bibliography:
    52 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    August 1987
  • Latest Book:
    January 2024
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About the Author

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 toward a PhD in Scotish Literature. His fist Rebus novel was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into twenty two languages and are best sellers on several continents. Ian has been elected Hawthorden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award as well as recieving two Dagger awards for the years best short story, and the Gold Dagger for fiction. He is olso the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Albertay, St. Andrews and Edinbourgh. He has recieved an OBE for his services to Literature, opting to recieve the prize in his home city of Edinbourgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.

Full Series List in Order

A John Rebus Mystery

1 - Knots and Crosses (Aug-1987)
2 - Hide and Seek (1990)
3 - Tooth and Nail (1992)
4 - Strip Jack (1992)
5 - A Good Hanging and Other Stories (1992)
6 - The Black Book (1993)
7 - Mortal Causes (1994)
8 - Let It Bleed (1995)
9 - Black and Blue (Oct-1997)
10 - Hanging Garden (Sep-1998)
11 - Dead Souls (Oct-1999)
12 - Death Is Not the End (Jun-2000)
13 - Set in Darkness (Nov-2000)
14 - The Falls (Nov-2001)
15 - Resurrection Men (Feb-2003)
16 - The Question of Blood (Feb-2004)
17 - Fleshmarket Alley (Feb-2005)
18 - The Naming of the Dead (Apr-2007)
19 - Exit Music (Sep-2008)
20 - Standing in Another Man's Grave (Jan-2013)
21 - Saints of the Shadow Bible (Jan-2014)
22 - The Beat Goes On (Aug-2015)
23 - Even Dogs in the Wild (Jan-2016)
24 - Rather Be the Devil (Feb-2017)
25 - In a House of Lies (Jan-2019)
26 - Rebus: Long Shadows: The New Play (Jul-2020)
27 - A Song for the Dark Times (Oct-2020)
28 - A Heart Full of Headstones (Oct-2022)
29 - Midnight and Blue (Jan-2024)

Multi-Author Series List

Bibliomysteries

27 - The Travelling Companion (Mar-2016)

Book List in Order: 52 titles

  • Knots and Crosses

    A John Rebus Mystery - 1

    DETECTIVE JOHN REBUS: HIS CITY IS BEING TERRORIZED BY A BAFFLING SERIES OF MURDERS ...AND HE'S TIED TO A MANIAC BY AN INVISIBLE KNOT OF BLOOD. Once John Rebus served in Britain's elite SAS. Now he's an Edinburgh cop who hides from his memories, mi...

  • Hide and Seek

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 2

    COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE... At night the summer sky stays light over Edinburgh. But in a shadowy, crumbling housing development, a junkie lies dead of an overdose, his bruised body surrounded by signs of Satanic worship. John Rebus cou...

  • Watchman

    From #1 international bestseller Ian Rankin, an unlucky spy gets one last chance at redemption. Miles Flint is a spy who has been making some serious mistakes. His last assignment led to the death of a foreign official in London, and after getting to...

  • A Good Hanging and Other Stories

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 5

    A killer makes a frantic phone confession to police, only to recant with equal desperation--and absolute conviction...An attempt on the life of a strangely reclusive war vet yields questions about his mysterious past--and his very existence...A thirt...

  • Strip Jack

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 4

    Gregor Jack has it all: young, wealthy, and charming, he's a highly respected member of Parliament, with a beautiful wife--and a closet bursting with skeletons. When he's caught in a police raid on an Edinburgh brothel, his house of cards begins to t...

  • Tooth and Nail

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 3

    Scottish homicide detective John Rebus has been sent from "North of the Border" to help London police catch a serial killer with a gruesome M.O. Teamed with a London cop he wants to trust but can't, Rebus lets a beautiful psychologist into the case a...

  • The Black Book

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 6

    Five years ago, a mysterious fire burned Edinburgh's seedy Central Hotel to ashes. Long-forgotten and unsolved, the case reappears when a charred body--with a bullet in its head--is found amongst the ruins. Inspector John Rebus knows that his superio...

  • Mortal Causes

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 7

    In Edinburgh you're never far from a peaceful spot, or from a hellish one either. Now, in the heat of summer, in the midst of a nationalist festival, Inspector John Rebus is on the murder case of a young man left hanging in a spot where his screams w...

  • Blood Hunt

    A former soldier, Gordon Reeve knows something about killing. So, despite the fact that his journalist brother Jim's death has been ruled a suicide, he can't shake the feeling that someone is responsible--and someone, Gordon thinks, will pay. Trav...



  • Let It Bleed

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A John Rebus Mystery - 8

    In the dark days and biting windstorms of an Edinburgh winter, two drop-out kids dive off the towering Forth Road Bridge. A civic office is spattered by a grisly gun-blast. Two suicides and a murder that just don't add up, unless John Rebus can crunc...

  • Adventures in Babysitting

    in Master's Choice: Volume II

    An outstanding array of crime fiction by some of today's leading authors is accompanied by short stories from the acclaimed writers who inspired them and features works by Ian Rankin, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Higgins Clark, Evan Hunter, Edgar Allan Po...

  • Someone Got To Eddie

    in 3rd Culprit (Worldwide)

    Crime in all its devious incarnations is presented in this treat of murderous morsels dished out by old ppros and promising newcomers. Artfully crafted and impossible to put down, each story bountifully demooonstrates why these authors are la creme d...

  • Black and Blue

    A John Rebus Mystery - 9

    A murdered oil-rig worker. A copycat serial killer dubbed "Johnny Bible. And a reopened investigation that doesn't bode well for Detective John Rebus or his mentor, Inspector Lawson Geddes. Rebus's Scotland, along with his malt-soaked psyche, is ridd...

  • Hanging Garden

    A John Rebus Mystery - 10

    Detective John Rebus--as tough and complex as they come--wages his own private war with the bottle in a Scotland as smokey, seductive, and multi-layered as a single-malt. And in Jan Rankin's growing body of work, readers can always find gripping susp...

  • Dead Souls

    A John Rebus Mystery - 11

    A colleague's suicide. Pedophiles. A missing child. A serial killer. Driven by instinct and experience, John Rebus searches for connections, against official skepticism. Soldiering through dank, desperate slums and the tony flats of the Scottish elit...

  • Rebus: The Early Years

    From bestselling Ian Rankin, winner of the 1997 CWA Macallan Gold Dagger for fiction for Black & Blue, come the early Inspector Rebus novels, gathered in one volume for the first time.

    KNOTS & CROSSES: Two girls have been abducted and brutal...

  • Death Is Not the End

    A John Rebus Mystery - 12

    For readers unfamiliar with the blistering plots and language of Ian Rankin's longer works, this special edition novella is the perfect opportunity to get to know Rankin and his unforgettable creation, Inspector John Rebus. For longtime Rebus fans, i...

  • Set in Darkness

    A John Rebus Mystery - 13

    A man dead for twenty years is found behind a wall in the renovated Parliament Building of newly independent Scotland. A tramp jumps off of a bridge and leaves behind a suitcase full of cash. And Roddy Grieve, a political candidate and the favorite s...

  • The Falls

    A John Rebus Mystery - 14

    When the privileged daughter of a merchant banker disappears, a search through her e-mails uncovers her secret life--and her bizarre correspondence with an on-line game player who delights in macabre puzzles. The first game was for the girl. The next...



  • Tell Me Who to Kill

    in Mysterious Pleasures

    'Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool. A clever fool -- perhaps -- but a fool just the same' RAYMOND CHANDLER Ever since its creation in 1953, the Crime Writers' Association has celebrated and champione...

  • Resurrection Men

    A John Rebus Mystery - 15

    Packed off to the remote Scottish Police College for a lesson in teamwork -- after hurling a mug at his supervisor's face -- Inspector John Rebus finds himself in a snake pit. His classmates, an unruly band of rebel cops known as Resurrection Men, ar...

  • The Question of Blood

    A John Rebus Mystery - 16

    Just how random were the killings at Edinburgh's posh, private Port Edgar Academy? Everyone assumed a lone madman was responsible for the melee at the school. But why was the killer chummy with the class misfits? Why is the sole surviving witness so ...

  • Witch Hunt

    "A formidable presence in Rankin's precision-tooled plot.... `Witch' is the code name for the tall, wraithlike woman who has been working as a contract killer for almost twenty years, picking off prominent political, military, and industrial figur...

  • Fleshmarket Alley

    A John Rebus Mystery - 17

    On a notorious street where propriety and decadence clash, in the basement of a newly renovated bar, the bones of a woman and child are discovered beneath a concrete floor. It's an unusually gruesome find, even for Fleshmarket Alley. When Inspector J...

  • The Flood

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Mary Miller had always been an outcast. As a young girl she had fallen into the hot burn - a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine. Fished out white-haired and half-dead, sympathy for her quickly faded when the young man who pushe...

  • Rebus's Scotland

    Ian Rankin's guide to the places in Scotland that have provided inspiration for his bestselling Inspector Rebus novels.

    'His novels are playing a significant part in redefining Scotland's image of itself in literature' INDEP...

  • Bleeding Hearts

    A PROFESSIONAL ASSASSIN is paid well to do his work and ask no questions. Total secrecy is part of the job. But after Michael Weston completes a successful mission in London, the police are immediately on his tail. How did they know where to find him...

  • The Naming of the Dead

    A John Rebus Mystery - 18

    WHEN AN INTERNATIONAL conference delegate falls to his death during a dinner at Edinburgh Castle, John Rebus is given what looks like a simple suicide to write up. But even as he keeps it out of the headlines, Rebus probes where no probing is wanted ...

  • Concrete Evidence

    in Penguin Book of Crime Stories

    International bestselling author Peter Robinson turns his razor-sharp instinct for crime writing to this unique anthology featuring the cream of crime fiction. With a selection of 15 stories featuring established bestsellers and new voices, The Pengu...



  • Exit Music

    A John Rebus Mystery - 19

    THE FINAL OUTING FOR ONE OF CRIME FICTION'S MOST BELOVED HEROES. JOHN REBUS IT'S LATE FALL in Edinburgh and late in the career of Detective Inspector John Rebus. As he ties up loose ends before his retirement, a new case lands on Rebus's desk: a d...

  • Doors Open

    Three friends descend upon an art auction in search of some excitement. Mike Mackenzie-retired software mogul, bachelor and fine art enthusiast-wants something that money can't buy. Fellow art-lover Allan Cruickshank is bored with his banking career ...

  • A Cool Head

    "My dad used to say to me, 'Try to keep a cool head and a warm heart'. At least I think it was my dad. I don't really remember him." Gravy worked in the graveyard - hence the name. He was having a normal day until his friend Benjy turned up in a car ...

  • Dark Entries

    HELLBLAZER's John Constantine must become part of HAUNTED PALACE -- a closed-set reality game-show (think BIG BROTHER or SCI-FI's new reality show, ESTATE OF PANIC) in order to deal with a supernatural murder of one of the contestants. He enters as a...

  • The Complaints

    Nobody likes The Complaints--they're the cops who investigate other cops. It's a department known within the force as The Dark Side, and it's where Malcolm Fox works. He's a serious man with a father in a nursing home and a sister who persists in an ...

  • The Impossible Dead

    Ian Rankin's brilliant new hero, Malcolm Fox, who made his celebrated debut in The Complaints, is investigating a police department where the corruption is deep and deadly. The Complaints: that's the Internal Affairs department that seeks out dirt...

  • Standing in Another Man's Grave

    A John Rebus Mystery - 20

    John Rebus returns to investigate the disappearances of three women from the same road over ten years. For the last decade, Nina Hazlitt has been ready to hear the worst about her daughter's disappearance. But with no sightings, no body, and no s...

  • Saints of the Shadow Bible

    A John Rebus Mystery - 21

    Rebus and Malcolm Fox go head-to-head when a 30-year-old murder investigation resurfaces, forcing Rebus to confront crimes of the past Rebus is back on the force, albeit with a demotion and a chip on his shoulder. He is investigating a car acciden...

  • The Beat Goes On

    A John Rebus Mystery - 22

    There is no detective like Ian Rankin's Detective Inspector John Rebus, a man The New Yorker calls "the ideal sleuth." Brilliant, irascible and frequently frustrating to both his friends and his long-suffering bosses, John Rebus has made the dark ...

  • Even Dogs in the Wild

    A John Rebus Mystery - 23

    Rebus comes out of retirement...to save his nemesis. Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is feeling the heat. She's investigating the death of a senior government prosecutor, David Minton, who has friends in high places. When one of their own is ki...



  • The Travelling Companion

    Bibliomysteries - 27

    A thrilling new novella about a Jekyll and Hydeâ€"obsessed Scot in Paris from the international-bestselling author of the Inspector Rebus mysteries. For recent college graduate Ronald Hastie, a job at the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop...

  • Meet and Greet

    From the internationally #1 bestselling novelist comes a tale of small time criminals on a new grift that might cost them everything.Peppard and Jarman have a new grift that seems simple enough: Go to the airport. Imitate a hired driver by copying a ...

  • Rather Be the Devil

    A John Rebus Mystery - 24

    Rebus investigates a cold case that just turned red hot. As he settles into an uneasy retirement, Rebus has given up his favorite vices. There's just one habit he can't shake: he can't let go of an unsolved case. It's the only pastime he has left ...

  • The Deathwatch Journal

    Saughton Prison, Edinburgh. 1962.

    Thomas Scott is a prison warder, assigned to watch over a man condemned to hang for the murder of his wife. As the two men talk over a number of days, Scott begins to doubt whether his prisoner is guilty of the c...

  • Long Shadows

    From the No.1 bestselling author of A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMESThe stage debut for the legendary detective John Rebus in this brand new, original story by Ian Rankin, written alongside the award-winning playwright Rona Munro.John Rebus is not as young ...

  • In a House of Lies

    A John Rebus Mystery - 25

    A new investigation threatens to unearth skeletons from Rebus' past Rebus' retirement is disrupted once again when skeletal remains are identified as a private investigator who went missing over a decade earlier. The remains, found in a rusted car...

  • Westwind

    For the first time in the US, this timeless cat-and-mouse classic from the Edgar Award-winning "genius" examines political tensions in an era of espionage (Lee Child, bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series). In Europe, the Americans...

  • Rebus: Long Shadows: The New Play

    A John Rebus Mystery - 26

    The stage debut for the legendary detective John Rebus in this brand new, original story by Ian Rankin, written alongside the award-winning playwright Rona Munro.

    John Rebus is not as young as he was, but his detective instincts have never l...

  • A Song for the Dark Times

    A John Rebus Mystery - 27

    "He’s gone…" When his daughter Samantha calls in the dead of night, John Rebus knows it’s not good news. Her husband has been missing for two days. Rebus fears the worst -- and knows from his lifetime in the police that his daug...

  • Daggers Drawn

    Edgy, twisted and disturbing, the first Crime Writers’ Association Daggers Award retrospective anthology featuring 19 visceral and thrilling stories. Featuring bestselling authors Ian Rankin, Jeffery Deaver, John Connolly, Denise Mina, John Harvey...



  • A Heart Full of Headstones

    A John Rebus Mystery - 28

    John Rebus stands accused: on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. It’s not the first time the legendary detective has taken the law into his own hands, though it might be the last. But what drove a good ma...

  • Midnight and Blue

    A John Rebus Mystery - 29

    John Rebus spent his life as a detective putting Edinburgh’s most deadly criminals behind bars.Now, he’s going to join them… In this tense, gripping game of cat and mouse, the ‘lodestone of the crime genre' (Financial Times) returns to his mu...

  • Beggars Banquet

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Over the years, Ian Rankin has amassed an incredible portfolio of short stories. Published in crime magazines, composed for events, broadcast on radio, they all share the best qualities of his phenomenally popular Rebus novels. Ten years ago, A GOOD ...

Award-Winning Books by Ian Rankin

Resurrection Men
2004 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Ian Rankin has published 52 books.

Ian Rankin does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Midnight and Blue, was published in January 2024.

The first book by Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses, was published in August 1987.

Yes. Ian Rankin has 1 series.
Author Series
Multi-Author Series
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