Michelle F's Reviews > Tooth and Nail

On balance, I find more to nitpick at with the Rebus books than I do to praise.

I don't actually mind that the main character is hard to like. His flaws make him more realistic, and I do get so tired of those leads whose weaknesses ultimately are either insignificant or so obviously tailored specifically for redemption. Rebus' flaws are significant and impactive. Unfortunately they are also eminently stock: failed marriage, awkward fatherhood, unsuccessful substance avoidance, authority issues, lone wolf, skirt chaser, career dissatisfaction, etc etc. There has been, in the reading, some eye rolling.

I have bigger issues with the finer details, though. In Tooth and Nail, the inspector is sent on loan to consult on a serial murder case in London. Annoyingly, we are never really told a believable reason why. The thought that London cannot scrounge up its own murder inspector is ludicrous.

The murders themselves are intriguing enough on the surface, but the unfolding of the motive is clumsily done. It ends up feeling like a made-to-order mystery template, one which is occasionally engaging enough to make the disappointments far more noticeable.

I loved the bits where Rebus credits the huge team of people who put in hours on murder investigations. Despite this, though, he uses very little of their contribution in solving the case. All of that work ends up being nearly useless, but Rebus' “hunch” (a contrived, huge leap of a hunch) ends up making the whole team extraneous. (Meh).

Rebus' (or perhaps Rankin's) treatment of women as either 'Ugly and Adversarial' or 'so beautiful that their obvious intelligence is eclipsed by the hem of their skirt' is – yup – still irritating. The blind spots created by this shining beauty are so predictable that the representation of masculinity becomes, if not childish than at least adolescent.

I want to describe this all as just “so very arrrrg”, or as the result of Rankin's personal challenge to fit as many procedural tropes as he could into one story. I want to be angry at it, or maybe tired of it.

But

I like Rankin's skill, all the same. I actually like this book (marginally) more than the first two, and I feel like maybe three things are happening here: Rebus is settling into himself; Rankin is settling into Rebus and has reached the point where his character's voice is becoming its own entity and less a collection of isms; and I am settling into all of these things and am actually a bit curious as to how it might all continue to evolve.