Thursday, January 17, 2013

The Complaints

After Exit Music, Ian Rankin rather boldly decided to end his long-running Inspector Rebus series and start a new, unconnected one.  I thought this was a really positive move; the Rebus novels hit their peak about five books before the end of the series, and I was happy to see something new out of Rankin.

Of course, it's hard to review a novel like this in a vacuum; the first question one has is whether Malcolm Fox is just Rebus redux or something new.  Fortunately, he's actually pretty different, but not just a photographic negative of Rebus, which would have felt about as pointless as an exact copy.

Suffice it to say that Fox has his own quirks, the team he works with is reasonably interesting, and the mystery itself isn't bad.  The only odd thing to me was that it seems like Rankin was ready to resolve the Breck sub-plot in a completely different direction, and it felt like that ending was just dropped on the cutting-room floor.  A lot of the minor bits with Breck don't quite make sense with the pat ending; I wonder whether Rankin will pick up those pieces in a later novel.

Ultimately, I felt like this was an improvement over the last couple of Rebus novels, even if it didn't quite reach the heights of the middle of the Rebus series.

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