Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin is a Scottish crime novelist, born in 1960 in Cardenden, Fife. He is best known for his long-running Inspector Rebus series, which began in 1987 and has sold more than 35 million copies, making him for a time Britain's best-selling crime writer. Westwind (1990), one of his early non-Rebus thrillers, is a Cold War-era conspiracy novel following a satellite engineer who uncovers a plot connected to a British space mission, written before Rebus came to dominate his career. Rankin has since been appointed OBE and knighted for services to literature. His fiction generally favors grounded, procedural crime plotting over international-conspiracy thrillers, making Westwind something of an outlier in an otherwise Edinburgh-centered body of work.