This is the 13th DI John Rebus outing and I wouldn't like even to guess at the readership his creator, Ian Rankin, has built up. Fair enough, I suppose. Over the first five or six I was as eager to welcome them as anyone else. Then the volumes began to get bloated, with more and more ballast needed to keep them afloat.
This latest one is a typical example of a tightly written and suspenseful novel trying to struggle out from under a lard of superfluous waffle. There is too much of what is known in the theatre as "stage business", metaphorical fat ladies twirling garlands of gauze and taking the reader's attention away from the central theme of death and deception that every good crime novel should have.
This also leads to tacked-on endings - Patricia Cornwell also does this - where the writer suddenly realises he has to gather up the threads of his plot and does so in a haphazard and artificial manner, thus ruining a lot of the good work already accomplished.
Having got all that off my chest, I now await excoriation from the millions of Rebus fans out there. For the record, let me just say that Resurrection Men has our hero banished to a police college in central Scotland, on foot of throwing a mug of tea at his superior.
There he meets up with a collection of fellow policemen, who have also been sent there for some disciplinary reason or other. It is not too long before we realise that Rebus is the mole on the trail of bent coppers. Running alongside this plot device, there is the murder inquiry being conducted by DS Siobhβn Clarke, where an art dealer named Edward Marber has been done to death.
Of course both investigations are inter-connected, but it takes over 300 pages before our author gets around to admitting this. In the meantime, Rebus smokes innumerable cigarettes, drinks gallons of beer, and agonizes over his crippled daughter, his estranged wife and his on-again, off-again relationship with his new friend Jean.
Rebus is a strong and ultimately likable character, the Scottish settings and dialogue are expertly done, and the writing, a lot of the time, is smoothly laconic. But I still think that Mr Rankin should go back to his earlier and more focused style: lean, mean and always with the bull's-eye in sight.
Vincent Banville's latest crime novel Cannon Law has just been published by New Island