Dead Souls

An Inspector Rebus Novel

By: Ian Rankin

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

A colleague's suicide. Pedophiles. A missing child. A serial killer. Driven by instinct and experience, John Rebus searches for connections, against official skepticism. Soldiering through dank, desperate slums and the tony flats of the Scottish elite, Inspector Rebus uncovers a chain of crime, deceit, and hidden sins--knowing it's really himself he's trying to save.©1999 Ian Rankin; (P)2001 Books on Tape, Inc.

My first Scottish crime novel

An interesting listen, a different kind of listen. A Scottish author, a Scottish narrator, set in Scotland, it took some getting used to. But it's no different than a USA period or geographic piece. It was interesting listening to the Scottish accent, hear the differences in English accents, the pronunciations, vocabulary, etc. On top of it all, it was interesting story. By the end of it I wasn't even noticing the accents. John Rebus has his own character, dark and brooding, like a lot of other crime fighters. I'd like to go to the Oxford Bar sometime, in fact, I'd like to go to Scotland sometime. Living in the desert, listening to this book in the summer, makes Scotland seem like a nice place to visit. Maybe someday. And, I'll give Ian Rankin another shot at some point.

a very dark book in the series

lots of twists and turns here, just when you thought the main character might turn things around the death of a good friend sends him down a rat hole again. good deals with a lot of issues like pedophiles that are just darken themselves, as well as some very clever evil characters. I don't like to criticize performance in the audio realm but this is a new player and he does not do as good a job as the previous ones in differentiating the characters. it may be that I have to develop a new ear for the new actor.

Not a fan of the reader

We have had the same voice for 9 books and this new voice really took some time to get used too. Made me not want to finish the book.

Awful, awful monotoned narration.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I would only recommend this audio book if you, like me, are trying to go through the Inspector Rebus series in order and you really need it to be audio. I'm only partway through and I'm severely tempted to stop and buy a Kindle or printed version instead. This guy's reading has all the pizzazz of an old fashioned radio weather reporter.
I think this may be only the second book in my life where I'll try accelerating the speed to 1.25x in the app, just to get it over faster.

Big Rankin/Rebus fan but the narrator not so hot

As the series develops Rebus seems to be maturing in an interesting way. Among Rankin’s gifts appears not only to be narrative arcs within each novel but a long character arc for Rebus and the other characters.
However, Geoffrey Howard did not do such a great job. I’m no expert, (but I have traveled extensively through out the England, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as the Irish Republic) and his characters sounded slightly Irish at times. He wasn’t able to capture the class differences between characters nor get at that trilled inflection that the Scottish have in their tongues.