Exit Music

This book by Ian Rankin is the 17th and last in Rankin's series featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus. Needless to say I've read all 17; just finished Exit Music last weekend. Just recently I wrote about the mini-depression that comes from finishing a great book. How much worse it is to finish a great series! Rebus is one of the most interesting and real characters I've ever come across. Totally different from Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, but the same sense of life and struggle.

Rebus was an outsider, somebody that never fit in the police force or anywhere else; he sacrificed his marriage, most of his friendships, and his faith to the job itself. I'm not that kind of brooding obsessive; there's no way my work will expand to fill my entire life. Still I have the same sense of being an outsider. To really get ahead requires some devotion to consensus-building, to a quid-pro-quo maintenance of favors received vice favors given, and looking to advance your ally's self-interest and squelch your opponents. These are games John Rebus never played, and I've never succeeded at. One of the best things about Rankin's books is that he doesn't glamorize Rebus's iconoclasm and outsider-ness; a trap so many boring and tedious private eye writers fall into. The cost to his career and private life is pretty obvious.

And now it's all over... no more Rebus!