Ian Rankin Books in Order

Now in Edinburgh prison after the events of A Heart Full of Headstones, Rebus becomes entangled in the death of a fellow inmate found in a locked cell. As investigators circle him, he has to navigate prison factions and decide who, if anyone, he can trust.

This compact piece follows someone on the way up whether in crime, politics or business who discovers how unstable new power can be. A single incident tests how far they are willing to go to protect a reputation that has barely been earned.

A concise portrait of Rankin’s most famous detective, looking at his background, habits and the Edinburgh he patrols. It serves as a companion piece for readers who want a quick guide to who Rebus is and why he still matters after so many cases.

Rebus faces trial for a serious crime, even as flashbacks show him, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox probing abuse and corruption around Edinburgh’s Tynecastle station. Old deals with Big Ger Cafferty and a new crime family force Rebus to reckon with what kind of cop he has been.

Set in 1972 Glasgow, this prequel finds newly minted detective Jack Laidlaw investigating the murder of a mob lawyer caught between rival gang bosses. Co written from William McIlvanney’s unfinished manuscript, it shows Laidlaw’s early clashes with colleagues, criminals and his own conscience.

Rebus drives to a remote northern village when his daughter Samantha reports her partner missing near a former wartime camp. While local police eye her as their prime suspect, Clarke and Fox chase the murder of a Saudi student in Edinburgh that may connect back north.

Written for the stage, this story finds an aging Rebus drawn into a decades old murder when the victim’s daughter appears at his door. Teaming up with Siobhan Clarke and circling Cafferty once more, he tests how far loyalty can stretch after retirement.

When a long missing private investigator is found dead in a rusted car, his ankles chained with police issue cuffs, old failures come back to haunt the force. Rebus, now retired and ill, works alongside Clarke and Fox to untangle buried corruption.

A young Scottish book lover working at a Paris bookshop meets a collector who claims to own lost Robert Louis Stevenson manuscripts. Drawn in by the promise of literary treasure and a mysterious assistant, he lets obsession blur the line between scholarship, desire and madness.

Kept awake by memories and health worries, Rebus starts digging into the unsolved 1970s murder of a woman in an Edinburgh hotel. The cold case collides with Siobhan Clarke’s inquiry into an attack on young crime boss Darryl Christie, pulling in Malcolm Fox and Cafferty.

A short, tightly focused story in which an everyday encounter at an airport or event becomes something much riskier. Small social missteps escalate into a confrontation that reveals how quickly strangers can collide over fear, guilt or opportunity.

Threatening notes and a shooting pull semi retired gangster Cafferty back into danger, while Siobhan Clarke investigates a murdered prosecutor and Malcolm Fox shadows a Glaswegian crime family. Rebus is dragged out of retirement to uncover a decades old betrayal behind the new violence.

This collection gathers every John Rebus short story in one volume, following him from early days on the force to uneasy retirement. The pieces fill in gaps between the novels and spotlight Edinburgh’s alleys, pubs and lost souls in bite sized investigations.

In this short, high pressure case, a weary officer finds that a routine inquiry is hiding a much darker crime. As the clock runs down, split second choices decide who walks away and who does not.

Set in contemporary Edinburgh, this play follows Isobel McArthur, Scotland’s first female chief constable, as she reopens doubts about a serial killer she helped jail decades earlier. Revisiting the case tangles her family and colleagues in mind games, corruption and a dangerous battle of wills.

Reinstated as a detective sergeant, Rebus helps Malcolm Fox reopen an old murder tied to the Summerhall station where he once served. As Police Scotland is created and loyalties shift, he must decide how much of his own past he is willing to expose.

Officially retired, Rebus works cold cases when a woman begs him to look into her daughter’s disappearance years earlier. He spots a pattern of missing women along the A9, drawing him back into CID, up to the Highlands and into conflict with Malcolm Fox.

Fox and his Complaints team travel to Fife to check that a tainted detective’s colleagues are clean. When the officer’s whistleblowing uncle is murdered, Fox finds himself knee deep in an old political scandal and a new cover up that powerful people want buried.

Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox works in the Complaints, the unit that investigates other cops. Tasked with looking into rising star Jamie Breck over child pornography allegations, Fox is pulled into a parallel murder close to home and must decide which officers he can trust.

Occult investigator John Constantine agrees to appear on a haunted house style reality TV show plagued by strange phenomena. He soon realises the series is not made for human viewers at all but for an audience in Hell, and escaping will take every trick he knows.

Gravy, a gentle man who tends the graves in a cemetery, agrees to help a wounded friend by hiding his gun and car. Inside the vehicle he finds a fortune in cash, drawing him into a botched robbery and some very dangerous company.

Bored millionaire Mike Mackenzie teams up with an art professor and a banker to steal paintings from a Scottish art warehouse on an open doors day, swapping the originals for forgeries. To pull it off they enlist a gangster, and the perfect crime starts to unravel.

In his final days before mandatory retirement, Rebus investigates the beating death of a Russian dissident poet and a linked house fire. The trail winds through Scottish politics, oligarch money and Cafferty’s shifting power, while Siobhan Clarke prepares to face the job without her mentor.

With the G8 summit and mass protests roiling Scotland, Rebus attends his brother’s funeral then drifts to the margins of a politically sensitive case. Siobhan Clarke leads on a dead MP and a vigilante website naming offenders, while both detectives reckon with family ties.

An omnibus bringing together A Good Hanging, Beggars Banquet and the Rebus story Atonement, this volume collects Rankin’s shorter fiction in one place. It is a handy way to see how his detective and his city changed between the early and later novels.

Part memoir, part travel book, this portrait of Scotland follows Rankin around the real streets, bars and closes that shaped John Rebus. It blends anecdotes, photographs and local history to show the darker and lighter sides of Edinburgh and the country beyond.

Pushed toward retirement and deprived of a desk, Rebus roams cases involving a murdered asylum seeker, two skeletons under a cellar floor and a brutalised Kurdish journalist. The investigation exposes tensions around immigration, detention centres and those who profit from the vulnerable.

Suspended and nursing badly burned hands, Rebus looks into a school shooting in which an ex soldier apparently killed two boys and himself. The closer he gets to the gun’s true origin, the more the case brushes politics, intelligence agencies and his own family.

Twelve Rebus short stories trace a year in Edinburgh, from Festival crowds to bleak New Year streets. Each compact case highlights a different facet of Rebus and the city, from petty scams to murder, and rewards fans looking for smaller, sharper mysteries.

After throwing a mug at a superior, Rebus is packed off to a residential retraining course with other troublesome detectives. Secretly, he is there to root out an old corruption scandal, even as Siobhan Clarke investigates an art dealer’s murder back in Edinburgh.

Twenty one crime stories range from suburban murders to hitmen in fairgrounds and bent cops on their last job. Several feature John Rebus, while others explore Edinburgh and beyond, offering sharp little studies of greed, guilt and bad luck.

When a banker’s postgraduate daughter disappears near Edinburgh, a huge investigation swings into motion. Rebus and Siobhan Clarke chase an online role playing game, eerie miniature coffins and family pressure to uncover what really happened to a young woman who slipped through the cracks.

Michael Weston is a professional hit man with haemophilia who has learned to live carefully with both his condition and his guilt. When the father of a young woman he killed by mistake hires a private detective to track him down, Weston becomes the hunted.

As Scotland prepares to reopen its Parliament, Rebus juggles three deaths a long hidden corpse in an old fireplace, a homeless man with a suitcase of cash and a murdered rising politician. Property deals, old secrets and Big Ger Cafferty link them all.

Rebus publicly outs a registered sex offender he spots at the zoo, only to watch the man end up dead. At the same time a notorious killer returns from an American prison, forcing Rebus to confront his own prejudices about redemption.

Rebus is stretched thin by overlapping cases, from a suspected Nazi war criminal living quietly in Edinburgh to gang warfare over drugs and trafficking. When his daughter is badly injured in a hit and run, he blurs every line to strike back.

Asked to find a missing young man who vanished after a night in a Fife nightclub, Rebus is forced to revisit an old relationship and the choices he never made. A compact case becomes a meditation on loyalty, aging and regret.

This slim collection gathers early Rankin tales, including the title story about a gallery curator hiding a long running forgery scheme. The pieces move between Edinburgh and London, showing criminals, collectors and ordinary people caught on the edge of bad decisions.

Juggling four cases at once, Rebus chases a killer copycatting the unsolved Bible John murders while under internal investigation himself. From Glasgow oil rigs to Shetland, he confronts past mistakes and the price of bending rules in pursuit of the truth.

After a disastrous car chase ends with two young men jumping from the Forth Road Bridge, Rebus cannot accept the official line. His search links a dying prisoner, missing money and a powerful clique in government that would prefer silence.

Ex SAS soldier Gordon Reeve travels to the United States when his journalist brother is found dead in an apparent suicide. Suspecting murder, he retraces his brother’s last story about a powerful chemical company and uncovers a conspiracy that stretches across continents.

During the Edinburgh Festival a brutally executed body is found in a hidden close, marked with extremist tattoos. Rebus is drawn into a murky alliance between Scottish nationalist hardliners and Northern Irish paramilitaries, with Cafferty hovering at the edges.

In this brief crime tale, a seemingly simple favour drags an ordinary person into dangerous territory. A job that sounds straightforward turns out to hide buried secrets, forcing a choice between backing away and digging themselves in even deeper.

An elusive female assassin known as Witch strikes across Europe, leaving intelligence agencies scrambling. As investigators close in, political secrets, double agents and a ruthless personal agenda make the hunt as dangerous for the hunters as for their target.

When a colleague is beaten into a coma, Rebus follows clues in the officer's notebook to an unsolved fire at a seedy hotel. The trail winds through an Elvis themed diner and gangster Big Ger Cafferty’s empire toward a buried body.

Sent to London to assist in catching the Wolfman, a serial killer who bites his victims, Rebus clashes with local detectives and a seductive profiler. Far from home, he struggles with family worries while chasing a ruthless predator.

A late night brothel raid exposes rising MP Gregor Jack, triggering scandal and his wife's disappearance. Rebus senses a setup and digs into the couple's privileged circle, where loyalty, blackmail and old grudges turn deadly.

Twelve Edinburgh based Rebus stories follow the detective through a year of cases, from tourist packed festivals to bleak winter streets. Each short mystery shows a different corner of the city and the compromises Rebus makes to deliver justice.

After Britain’s only spy satellite briefly goes dark, ground controller Martin Hepton notices anomalies nobody wants to discuss. Teaming with the lone survivor of a shuttle crash, he uncovers a scheme that reaches from military command rooms to the future of the transatlantic alliance.

Rebus finds a drug addict posed like a ritual sacrifice in a grim Edinburgh squat. When the trail leads to a secretive club where powerful men watch illegal fights, he uncovers a conspiracy others in the force would rather ignore.

MI5 surveillance officer Miles Flint begins to suspect his own service after two disasters strike operations he worked on. Sent to Belfast to monitor an arrest, he realises an assassination is planned and ends up on the run with an Irish suspect, hunting a lethal conspiracy.

Detective Sergeant John Rebus hunts a killer abducting schoolgirls in Edinburgh while anonymous notes dredge up his buried SAS past. As the case turns personal, he must face his own history to stop a predator stalking the city.

In a fading Fife mining town, Mary Miller has lived with suspicion ever since she fell into a polluted burn as a child and her hair turned white. Years later, her son’s risky love for a homeless girl forces Mary to confront the secrets she buried.