Edinburgh police inspector John Rebus has become one of Britain's best fictional cops: iconoclastic, a confirmed rule-breaker, but utterly ferocious in his determination to get to the bottom of a case. Like John Harvey's Charlie Resnick, another top British cop, Rebus' personal life is usually in tatters: too much job, too little life, with small pleasures (jazz for Resnick, '60s rock for Rebus) filling in for relationships. When Rebus' adult daughter, his only solace on the personal front, is nearly killed in a suspicious hit-and-run incident, the copper's ferocity is ratcheted up a notch, with his ire directed at the objects of his two open investigations--a suspected Nazi war criminal and two rival crime lords. Nobody does grit like Rankin. The Rebus novels live on texture the taste of cold coffee and the grinding edges of frayed nerves take on a visceral reality as the cops slog toward answers that only bring more questions. Against the unremitting grayness of this world, Rebus' beleaguered humanity shines in bold relief.