Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Dare you enter the close they call Fleshmarket?
Fleshmarket Close (Rebus 15)
What you need to know before your trail
Rebus has a difficult time at the moment. His old police station is closing down and he is being ‘encouraged’ to retire, But he’s a stubborn man and he’s determined to hang on and solve this latest case – a case involving an illegal immigrant who is found murdered in an Edinburgh housing scheme.
Whilst investigating the more sleazy and dark side of Edinburgh, he plows straight into the city’s underworld and to the chilling Close they call Fleshmarket where the name gives a clue to what lies beneath.
And what does the housing estate -nicknamed Knoxland have to do with it all?
Travel Guide
Edinburgh is Rebus’ and Rankin’s stomping ground and this is no surprise when walking the streets of Edinburgh after having read this novel. This is the Edinburgh undergoing change however. Many outsiders, immigrants are coming into the city. Even Rebus himself is being moved from his ‘ home’ in St Leonard’s police station to Gayfield Square. So the sense of feeling alone, isolated, far from the familiar is the backdrop to the novel – where Rebus himself is only on the edges of having been told to keep out.
Fleshmarket Close was so called because the city used to hold its meat market there but Ian Rankin was inspired by the name and felt it fitted his idea for a novel about the trade in human flesh so to speak. The setting, with the immigrant problem, the gritty changes of a city, the side no tourist sees, is set in the flesh and blood of Edinburgh
The fight between the underworld and the overworld – the police – is set in and around the city’s streets.
Streetview Maps
Edinburgh: Fleshmarket Close and a grisly secret
Edinburgh: Arden Street - Rebus has a flat here
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information:
Twitter: @Beathhigh
Facebook: /IanRankinBooks
Web: ianrankin.net
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
