Inspector Rebus investigates the disappearance of a member of Parliament's wife after her husband was caught in a police raid on an Edinburgh brothel.

Inspector John Rebus searches for the connections between a colleague's suicide, a serial killer, a missing child, and pedophiles.

After a young student's strange disappearance, Inspector John Rebus gets a lead in the shape of a carved wooden doll in an eight-inch coffin (found in the student's home village) and an Internet-based role-playing game.

When a former soldier and recluse murders two 17-year-old students at a posh Edinburgh boarding school, Army investigators show up to snoop around the scene of the crime, and links between the killer and a local group of "Goths" begin to surface. Just as Rebus finds himself in the thick of the murder inquiry, he's threatened with suspension from the police force because a man who has been menacing his partner dies in the same fire that has left Rebus...

Sent to man an abandoned police station during an international conference between the leaders of the free world, officer John Rebus investigates the suspicious falling death of a delegate at an Edinburgh banquet. When an international delegate falls to his death during a dinner at Edinburgh Castle, Inspector John Rebus is given what looks like a simple suicide to write up. Even as he keeps it out of the headlines, Rebus probes where no probing is...

Two Scottish detectives investigate the disappearance of a hitchhiking teenage girl, their only clue a photo sent from the missing girl's cell phone. Rebus has never shied away from lost causes, one of the many ways he managed to antagonize his bosses when he was on the force. Now he's back as a retired civilian, reviewing abandoned files. Necessary work, but it's not exactly scratching the itch he feels to be in the heart of the action. He's investigating...

Rebus comes out of retirement...to save his nemesis.
Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is feeling the heat. She's investigating the death of a senior government prosecutor, David Minton, who has friends in high places. When one of their own is killed, the powers that be want answers fast. But Clarke is puzzled: if Minton died in a robbery as everyone thinks, why is nothing missing from his home? The answer may lie not in what was taken, but...

A missing private investigator is found locked in a car hidden deep in the woods. Worse still--both for his family and the police--the body was in an area that had already been searched 10 years ago. Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is part of a new inquiry, combing through the mistakes of the original case. There were always suspicions over how the investigation was handled, and now--after a decade without answers-- it's time for the truth. Every...

"John Rebus stands accused: on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. But what drove a good man to cross the line? Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke may well find out. Clarke is tasked with the city's most explosive case in years, an infamous cop, at the center of decades of misconduct, has gone missing. Finding him will expose not only her superiors, but her mentor John Rebus. And Rebus himself may not have her...

"Brilliant, irascible and frequently frustrating to both his friends and his long-suffering bosses, John Rebus has made the dark places of Edinburgh his home for over two decades. THE BEAT GOES ON collects all of Ian Rankin's Rebus short stories for the first time, including two never-before published tales written specifically for this collection. From his beginnings as a young Detective Constable in "Dead and Buried," right up to his dramatic, but...