Exit Music
by Ian Rankin - Hardback £9.72
Forced to retire by both the law and his relieved superiors, Detective Inspector John Rebus knows that his time in the blue ranks must now come to an end. But how will he deal with this grim terminus?
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
'Rankin has an unparalleled ability to draw in the reader and make us feel every knock and setback in Inspector Rebus's red-raw life. Rarely has that talent been better displayed than in Exit Music which sees the flawed but redeemingly honest central character staggering towards the finishing line of an inglorious career that has utterly defined his life'
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Product Details
ISBN: 9781845378578
Publisher: New Holland
Publication Date: 15 February 2008
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Pages: 128 p.
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review 
Another cracker from Rankin, 14 April 2008
By Carol Cunningham (Scotland)
Couldn't wait to find out the end, but I'm so sorry to see him go. Rebus has been part of my life since I discovered him a good few years back and I can't believe I won't be following his troubled life any more. Rankin's creation was just about perfect, so believable, and although I shall miss looking forward to the next Rebus instalment, I truly think that the author should let him go peacefully and not think about resurrecting him in future novels. The little bit intrigue in the epilogue was just great, and a nice way to end the story, still keeping the reader guessing.
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The saga is over, or -----, 12 Mar 2008
By R. W. Thomas "wynfield48" (UK)
Having been following Rebus and team from the beginning it is difficult to believe it is all over. Rankin has done a great job in Exit Music and deserves a round of applause for keeping the conclusion low key, but intriguing.
We must wonder if Siobhan will feature in future Rankin novels. If so, it is difficult to imagine Rebus not reappearing in some form. I personally hope that Rankin will draw a veil on the characters and move onto a different theme.
It has been a brilliant ride. Thanks Ian for the memories
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Ian Rankin - Exit Music, 10 Dec 2007
By RachelWalker "RachelW" (England
Let's get one thing out of the way: I do not believe for one second that this is the last Rebus novel. I never believed it would be, and my mind isn't changed after finishing it. I would bet my very last penny that in a few years we'll see Rebus again, in some fictional form or another (cold cases, muscling in on Siobhan, whatever). Rankin quite clearly hasn't finished with this character, and he clearly hasn't finished with the city either.
Let's not re-hash too many plot details: suffice to say that a Russian poet living in Edinburgh is found rather nastily dead in a street you "wouldn't want to walk down alone at night" (Rankin's words). Cue some Russian businessmen visiting the city looking for investment opportunities, political machinations concerning independence, the mysterious economy-of-truth being exemplified by the girl who found the body, and the large, looming figure of Morris Gerald Cafferty, drinking quietly in the very hotel bar that the poet had just left...
It would be difficult to understate Rankin's prominent place in the landscape of world crime-fiction. (Or: British crime-fiction, Scottish crime-fiction, Scottish fiction, etc etc.) In the 20 years and 17 books over which we have shadowed Rebus' career in the police, Rankin has evolved from a competent penner of gritty, underdeveloped mysteries (Hide & seek, Strip Jack), into a writer of immensely high calibre, into a writer able to weave together novels which are simultaneously thick with plot and character, laced with subtle themes, and have as their backbone a compelling social interrogation, a tussle between enquiry into and straight, hard portraiture of, a complex city. Individually, the novels present a social snapshot, taken together, they catalogue a changing Edinburgh. Joan Smith once said of Ruth Rendell that anyone wishing to understand the changes in English society would do well to read her novels, and the same is true of Rankin re: Edinburgh. They are almost a perfect example of the argument for crime fiction as literature via social examination (if such an argument needed to be made: I don't think it does. Crime fiction is "literature" for many reasons, in my book.) Not only that, but in terms of crime fiction, Rankin seems to me the modern British standard-bearer (forgetting the Americans who did it decades before) for the alcoholic troubled cop, the loner with an authority problem we have seen so many times since. There are many other examples, but (apart from those two conspicuous Scandinavians Wallander and Hole), Rebus remains firmly the most impressive. He is the most rounded, the most realistic. The hardest to like but the one I ultimately find the most attractive. Most of all I admire his realistic contradictions, they are the things which can seem slapdash, but make us the tangled mental bundles we are. His development as a character, too, has been excellent. An accretion of changes, a slow, imperceptible shift in attitude and behaviours are characteristic of his growth. That development is bathed in a bitter light come Rebus' final, almost desperate sentences on Exit Music's final page.
As an individual novel in the series, Exit Music is not quite among Rankin's grandest achievements (Dead Souls or A Question of Blood, for example), but it's certainly very good, and a very fine novel to end the series on. It's also much better than the too-mired-in-politics Naming of the Dead, which I found rather a disappointment. Here, Rankin keeps a very close eye on the surrounding politics (the question of Scottish independence, exploiting it, the Russian's interest in using it, etc) but they don't overshadow the actual story. He also doesn't forget to provide us with an excellent mystery, either, and while the final solution may seem a little out of left field, it nonetheless satisfies, and Rankin reminds us that the bottom line requirement of his job is the creation of solveable detective puzzles.
Exit Music is written brilliantly, possibly with more subtlety and nuance in the writing than ever before. It may be the ending of a chapter in Rebus's career, but it also shows that Rankin's is in no way over. Hopefully, there is much more great work to come, Rebus or
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