Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

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Good news for fans of Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus: the latest Rebus novel, Strip Jack, will soon be available in the U.S. from St. Martin’s Press. Here’s an outing for Rebus that the author says “takes a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at the relationship between American tourists and their British hosts...”

Sir Walter Scott was dead.

He’d been found at the top of his namesake’s monument in Princes Street Gardens, dead of a heart attack and with a new and powerful pair of binoculars hanging around his slender, mottled neck.

Sir Walter had been one of Edinburgh’s most revered QCs until his retirement a year ago. Detective Inspector John Rebus, climbing the hundreds (surely it must be hundreds) of spiralling steps up to the top of the Scott Monument, paused for a moment to recall one or two of his run-ins with Sir Walter, both in and out of the courtrooms on the Royal Mile. He had been a formidable character, shrewd, devious, and subtle. Law to him had been a challenge rather than an obligation. To John Rebus, it was just a day’s work.

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