After a young student's strange disappearance, Inspector John Rebus gets a lead in the shape of a carved wooden doll in an eight-inch coffin and an Internet-based role-playing game.

Inspector John Rebus investigates a body found in a Queensbury House fireplace, the suicide of a homeless man in possession of a fortune and the murder of an ambitious politician--three deaths with ties to one of Scotland's most notorious criminals.

When a former soldier and recluse murders two 17-year-old students at a posh Edinburgh boarding school, Inspector John Rebus immediately suspects there is more to the case than meets the eye.

The leaders of the free world descend on Scotland for an international conference, and every cop in the country is needed for front-line duty ... except one. John Rebus' reputation precedes him, and his bosses don't want him anywhere near Presidents Bush and Putin, which explains why he's manning an abandoned police station when a call comes in. During a pre-conference dinner at Edinburgh Castle, a delegate has fallen to his death. Accident, suicide,...

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 could call the death and accident but won't. Instead, he tracks down a violent-tempered young woman who knew the dead boy and heard him cry out his terrifing last words: "Hide! Hide!" Now, with the help of a bright, conflicted young detective, Rebus...

Already tackling a murder in Edinburgh, Inspector John Rebus becomes involved when a copy-cat serial rapist called "Bible Johnny" begins striking in Aberdeen and must keep his wits about him in the center of the media circus surrounding the case.

"In Edinburgh you're never far from a peaceful spot, or from a hellish one either. Now, in the heart 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 would never be heart. To find the victim's identity--and his killer--Rebus searches from Edinburgh's most violent neighborhood to Belfast, Northern Ireland, among petty thugs, gunrunners, and heavyweight...

John Rebus has trouble in the form of a paroled murderer, a pedophile and the missing son of a former sweetheart, all coming together in a mystery that could cost him everything.

For the last decade, Nina Hazlitt has been ready to hear the worst about her daughter's disappearance. But the police investigation ground to a halt long ago, and Nina's pleas to the cold case department have led her nowhere. Then she meets the newest member of the team: former detective John Rebus, who has never shied away from lost causes. Two more women have gone missing from the same road, and he can sense a connection.

"Brilliant, irascible and frequently frustrating to both his friends and his long-suffering bosses, John Rebus has made the dark places of Edinburgh his home for over two decades. THE BEAT GOES ON collects all of Ian Rankin's Rebus short stories for the first time, including two never-before published tales written specifically for this collection. From his beginnings as a young Detective Constable in "Dead and Buried," right up to his dramatic, but...