Ian
Rankin's brooding Scottish Inspector John Rebus has solved numerous mysteries,
puzzlers and mind games over the course of 20 years in 16 novels on the U.K. best-seller
lists, but how to best care for a son with special needs wasn't one of them.
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That
task fell to Rankin and his wife Miranda when their youngest son Kit, now 12,
was diagnosed with Angelman Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by
little or no speech, jerky motor skills but a generally happy disposition with
frequent smiles and laughter. The Rankins lived on the edge
without any emergency fund while Ian struggled to survive as a novelist, first
in London, then rural France. They moved back to Edinburgh in 1996, where Ian
was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2002. Today,
Rankin is proud not only to have succeeded beyond his wildest expectations as
a perennial top seller in the U.K., but to have provided the deep emergency fund
that will attend to Kit's special needs for the rest of his life.  How
is Kit doing these days?
 He's
all right. He's still not walking, doesn't talk, can't communicate, but life is
still a ball. Everything he does in life is exciting and humorous to him, whether
it's just watching noisy buses going past, going to a cafe where music is being
played and people are being loud, going swimming or just walking down by the canal.
We take him horseback riding on Saturdays, to a special-needs riding unit on the
edge of the city. He has a ball. It's not well known; I don't know how many examples
of Angelman Syndrome there are in the world. There are a couple of hundred in
the U.K.
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