Fleshmarket Close is not one of the best of Rankin's John Rebus thrillers, but his second-best is still more than excellent. Middle age is catching up with Rebus--he currently has no desk as a none-too-subtle hint from his superiors that he should seek retirement--but he and his friend and protegee Siobhan, who is still not his lover, race around investigating a variety of seemingly unconnected cases? The sister of a dead rape victim is missing; stolen medical skeletons turn up embedded in a concrete floor; a Kurdish journalist is brutally killed; the son of a Glasgow ganglord has moved in to the Edinburgh vice scene.

Much of the book is dominated by two new settings--a sink estate divided between racist thugs and refugees, and a small town whose economy is dominated by an internment camp for those about to be deported; this is one of Rankin's preachier thrillers, but it is never less than intelligent and evocative in its descriptions of a contemporary squalor that spreads beyond the inner city. These are never quite orthodox police procedurals--Rebus' method is a little too like the standard private eye's way of wandering around being rude to people until something comes loose--but they have a deep seriousness about the way we live now that transcends mere noir moodiness.--Roz Kaveney

2008-03-03 Another good Ian Rankin novel

"Fleshmarket Close" is an enjoyable enough Ian Rankin thriller featuring the kind of labyrinthine plotting that is so characteristic of his novels. This offering contains a series of plot strands that are all connected ,tenuously at times. They include the murder of a Turkish refugee, the disappearance of a teenage girl, the murder of a convicted rapist and the discovery of two skeletons in a pub cellar. This is all set against a backdrop of an illegal immigration scam and a detention centre for asylum seekers. Rankin highlights the plight of these unfortunates extensively in this novel. Gerard Cafferty also makes an important cameo appearance. "Fleshmarket Close" is an absorbing read and draws the reader into an intriguing subterranean Edinburgh landscape cleverly , however perhaps the novel is slightly overlong on this occasion (475 pages) while the final denouement ,by contrast, is all a bit sudden and frenetic.