Entertainment Weekly
Brilliant...the kind of blistering police procedural that gives the genre a good name....Rankin's prose is so graceful, the complicated plot so seamless, and the portraits of even minor characters so searing, it makes for an almost flawless performance.
New York Times Book Review
Ian Rankin's Scottish police procedurals are so gritty you have to pick the shards out of your teeth when you finish one, and Black and Blue is as flinty as they come.
Kirkus Reviews
Nearly 30 years after a serial killer dubbed Bible John abruptly retired after three vicious murders, he's back in the news again. Johnny Bible, an equally perverted killer who seems to be much younger, is imitating him with a gusto that suggests close research. Even though he knew one of Johnny Bible's victims, Edinburgh's Inspector John Rebus is in no position to take on this new case; he's got his hands full with a murdered oil-rig painter and the threatened reopening of a case in which he and his mentor, Inspector Lawson Geddes, may have planted evidence years and years ago that framed Lenny Spaven, who went to his death insisting he was innocent. When Rebus takes a few days in Aberdeen to visit the oil company's headquarters and incidentally chat up the locals about another of Johnny Bible's victims, he ends up under suspicion of killing a fourth victim himself and gets stuck with a minder who'll report his every move back to the very same Chief Inspector who's been put in charge of the Spaven case. Can things get any worse? Of course they can. For even though Rebus is behind the eight-ball, another avenger—Bible John himself—is prepared to do whatever it takes to catch the copycat.
Rebus's eighth case (Let It Bleed, 1996, etc.) is his biggest and most grueling so far. Yet Rankin's dexterity in juggling plots and threats and motives lights up the darkness with a poet's grace. Reading him is like watching somebody juggle a dozen bottles of single malt without spilling a drop.
From the Publisher
A powerfully complex crime novel that offers a panoramic portrait of modern Scotland, from Glasgow gangland to the oil platforms of the North Sea.” —Mail on Sunday
“Rankin excels himself here as Rebus comes of age… a first-rate and gripping novel.” —Sunday Times
“Rankin's dexterity in juggling plots and threats and motives lights up the darkness with a poet's grace. Reading him is like watching somebody juggle a dozen bottles of single malt without spilling a drop.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Rankin's book is long and complex but rich in character and incident as Rebus dodges his investigators, follows his hunches into some violent confrontations, and explores the strange mid-ocean world of North Sea oil.” —Publishers Weekly
“Ian Rankin is a novelist of great scope, depth and power and Black & Blue is a dark, intensely evocative and altogether riveting thriller.” —Jonathan Kellerman
