Cecilia Grayson

Rebus is good, but not as sharp as he once was

From our UK edition

Cig 1 Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy, corruption . . . DS Rebus awoke with a start, his hand still clutching a can of lager. He’d been asleep in his chair, as usual. He rarely went to bed. Bed was for sober people. The phone was still ringing, so stumbling over LP sleeves, full ashtrays and empty bottles, he picked up the receiver, greasy from last night’s fry-up. ‘It’s Siobhan,’ his colleague DI Clarke announced herself. ‘A new case has popped up.’ Rebus massaged his brow with an Irn-Bru can and grunted. ‘An old case, I mean,’ Siobhan corrected herself. ‘Thirty years old.

‘Life after Life’, by Kate Atkinson – review

From our UK edition

Das also war des Pudels Kern! Everybody thought, ‘Oh, Groundhog Day,’ but they were wrong. Not that the pest-control man couldn’t have coped with a few marmots — he’d seen worse in his time. He’d been summoned because of an infestation of black bats. * Meriel’s confusion lay in the fact that she knew she had known a lot, yet suspected she also knew nothing. Her family couldn’t help with the contradictions surrounding her birth, nor with her multiple deaths. ‘It’s just déjà vu,’ her mother Emily said, or was it déjà lu? She hopped about from year to year, forwards and backwards (if only she’d keep still, the reader thought), gathering redundant adjectives.