On the trail of a burnt-out case

Detective Inspector Rebus, Ian Rankin's alcoholic Edinburgh policeman, has finally flipped. At a briefing meeting of the team investigating the murder of art dealer Edward Marber, bludgeoned to death with a brick outside his own front door, he hurls a mug of tea at his superior, Detective Chief Superintendent Gill Templar. Naturally, he's immediately bumped off the inquiry and sent on a rehabilitation course to Tulliallan, the Scottish Police College.

Here he finds five other maverick individuals whose careers have also jumped the rails: for all, Tulliallan is the last opportunity to reform. To retrain them in the art of working as a team, their martinet instructor, a retired detective chief inspector, resurrects an old, unsolved case: the murder, six years earlier, of Eric Lomax, a small-time Edinburgh criminal. Both Rebus and DI Francis Gray, another of the group, had worked on the investigation.

Is this coincidence, Rebus wonders, or should he be feeling paranoid? And why is the Crime Squad asking him to blackmail the Weasel, right-hand man of Big Ger Cafferty, the toughest and most successful gangster in Scotland? Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, young Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, fending off unwelcome approaches from her male colleagues, beavers away at the investigation of Marber's death.

There's a chaotic, confused, aleatory quality about much of Resurrection Men which brings it close to life - especially to the senseless muddle that is Rebus's life - and which marks a great improvement on the somewhat arch artificiality of Rankin's previous novel, The Falls. Indeed, the verisimilitude is such that it comes as a disappointment when all the plot threads are drawn neatly together at the conclusion of the book, even though one cannot but admire the author's virtuosity in bringing this about.

However, one cannot but also feel that in these novels Rebus is becoming more and more of a cult figure, and less and less accessible to those meeting him for the first time, who are likely to be teased by allusive references to earlier events, cases or women in his life.

One recurrent figure is Big Ger Cafferty, now as much a fixture in Rebus's life as Siobhan Clarke. Given the size of the Edinburgh underworld, this is perhaps inevitable, but familiarity is robbing him of sinisterness: Conan Doyle wisely restricted the appearances of Professor Moriarty, as PG Wodehouse did those of Aunt Agatha.

As always, Rebus's love affair with the bottle is brilliantly described; as always, the action is punctuated and the mood of the characters commented on by tracks from rock albums; and the reader receives a jaw-splintering left hook of a surprise as early as chapter six.