When a young student mysteriously disappears, Inspector John Rebus and his associate, Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke, come up with two bizarre clues--a carved wooden doll in a coffin and an Internet role-playing game--and must follow a deadly trail of similar dolls and coffins, from Edinburgh's dark body-snatching past to a fiendishly clever modern-day killer. Reprint.
Born in Scotland in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh and has since been employed as a grape picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, and punk musician.
Since publishing his first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, in 1987, the series has become phenomenally successful, with each new installment a runaway bestseller in the United Kingdom. Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. Black and Blue won the Crime Writers Association's Gold Dagger Award for best novel of the year in 1997.
He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons.