Inspector Rebus span a broad spectrum of Scotland, including council estates, tenements, business districts, nightclubs, prisons, dying mining towns, secluded villages and desolate hillsides, as well as the better-known pubs and streets of Edinburgh. Some of these locations are fictional, although they may be based on real places. For example, the Pilmuir estate is a conflation of the two real Edinburgh locations Pilton and Muirhouse. Other locations, such as the Oxford Bar, Arden Street, and St Leonards police station, are real. Frequent references to real places, or local politics firmly ground the Rebus series in the real world. Another strong feature of
Inspector Rebus novel, Rebus also reveals that his grandfather came from Poland. Rebus is a fan of 1960s popular music. He often connects situations with an apt song from the 1960s. The "Inspector Rebus" series is commercially successful in the United Kingdom, accounting for an estimated 10% of all crime book sales in the UK as of 2015. The books now routinely sell half a million copies within the first three months of printing and have been translated into 26 languages. As of 2015 they are published in the UK by the Orion Publishing Group. The seventeenth was thought to be the