THE twelfth Rebus novel gets straight in there. "You think I killed her, don't you?" are the opening words. The victim - as yet still just missing - is the student daughter of a wealthy Edinburgh banker. The suspect is her Irish boyfriend.

The man asking the questions is DI John Rebus, a splendid creation by Ian Rankin, right. You can tick many of the usual boxes with Rankin's Edinburgh detective: loner, divorced, quick-tempered, a maverick and a boozer - a tick for every one. He might be assembled from the stereotype drawer, but Rebus is a fully believable, flesh-and-blood copper, all the more to cherish for the compassion rising and falling beneath his hard drinker's shell.

The road to resolution begins with the discovery of a carved wooden doll in a six-inch coffin, found in the missing girl's home village. This baffling, seemingly timeless clue is tied to a thoroughly modern pointer: the student had been playing a dodgy Internet game and was at the beck and call of the mysterious on-line Quizmaster.

There is much to entertain and divert along the way, not least Rebus's prodigious drinking and his musical footnotes, with bits of rock history poking out of the pages like the curled ends of guitar strings.

Number 12 is not quite up to number 11, the thoroughly excellent Set In Darkness, in which the crimes seemed rooted in the rock of Scottish life. Here, the puzzle is less satisfying, though the final chase is certainly exciting. And as ever, Rebus makes for good, acerbic company.