It's a shame I'm giving up on the Rebus series in perpetuity for its sheer unbridled mediocrity, because to its credit, it has been improving. Knots and Crosses was perhaps the most generic police procedural of all time, and Hide and Seek was a thematically tight story with bizarre homophobia and terrible plotting.

Tooth and Nail is just...medicore. It's a standard stock crime novel, except Rankin's best ability as a writer- setting atmospheres- elevates it above that slightly. The plot is nothing special; in fact, some elements feel wholesale lifted straight out of Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, right down to the ridiciously offensive portrayal of gender identity.

Rebus being in hostile territory is a fairly decent hook, but quickly disintegrates as the only real antagonism he faces is from a singular one-dimensional arsehole while everybody else is perfectly reasonable to him. Well, apart from when his "Watson" DC George Flight gets into random arguments with him for no other reason than to prologue the book with contrived conflicts.

I found the answer to the murder mystery wholly unsatisfying and borderline moronic; the whole thing felt less like a genuinely earned twist and more the author just taking the piss by making the mystery impossible to solve. The killer's stock "abused as a child" background seems built entirely around a stupid gimmick rather than anything resembling character depth.

There are, at least, a few scant redeeming moments. A character introduced in the climax manages to be by far the most interesting and funny and I wish he had been in it more, and again Rankin's ability to build bleak cityscapes is fantastic. Also Rebus actually, y'know, solves the mystery himself instead of sitting around with his thumb up his crack until someone elsee just tells him the resolution like in the first two books.

I can't say I particularly enjoyed the first three Rebus books, which is a shame because I've met the author in real life and he was a lovely bloke. Anyway. 4/10