Why This Is Hell

( LXIV:Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead (2006) )

( LXV: Ian Rankin, Exit Lines (2007) )

( LXV: Sally Miller Gearheart, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979) )

( LXVI: Wendy Loncaster (and Malcolm Shields), Above All, the Sky: Walter Goodin (2008) )

So, 66 books in 2008, which I suspect is up on recent years, but in 2009 I want - and need - to get that up to over a hundred. That may be why I have five books on the go at once and haven't finished any of them.

XLVIII: The Saxon Shore Way (2006)

A cheat really - basically a publicity puff for the long distance footpath giving you little more than a description of the general route and then focusing on eight circular routes of varying lengths at various points on the path. You'd walk about 10% of the route if you did this, maybe less. There are reproductions of OS maps for the selected journeys, which aren't always clear (there's a lot of retracing steps) and brief descriptions of some of the elements on show, and a blank page for each walk for your notes. Chiz.

( IL: Ian Rankin, Dead Souls (1999) )

I picked this up in Rainham; now I need to seek out the next - Set in Darkness, although I should be reading for research.

( XXXIII: John Peel, Doctor Who: The Chase )

( XXXIV: Ian Rankin, Black and Blue (1997) )

Ian Rankin, Mortal Causes

I thought it would be odd to dispose of Mr Big so quickly after fully introducing him in The Black Book. He's back - in jail at the start of the book.

A body is discovered in one of the underground streets of Edinburgh, and it appears that he has been executed IRA style - however it seems more as if an off-shoot of the Orange order has been responsibility, and as the Edinburgh Festival is underway, the police fear sectarian gangs are going to run out of control. Rebus is seconded to a unit examining loyalist gun-running whilst he tries to solve the murder - which becomes doubly urgent when he discovers whose son the body is.

I suspect it would be difficult to guess the murderers' identities in a Rankin novel, it depends too much on withheld knowledge about this imaginary Edinburgh, and hiding in plain sight where we are told that Rebus has asked for some information but not what he has asked for. He also owes a little to the Continental Op in which the tactic is to go in heavy handed on an interrogation, not to get information from the questioning, but to see what the subject does afterwards.

Interesting take on a conflict we more often associate with Northern Ireland - and Rebus's past in Ulster is aluded to.

A break from Rebus now, not because I've run out of books (I have two more before the Two Pound Rule has so far let me down; I also have books up to #15) but because I need to re-read Philip K. Dick and about films based on his work.

I've never read any of the Rebus novels, nor have I seen the John Hannah or Ken Stott version (a difference in acting style that is nearly as extreme as Hale and Pace and Clarke and Buchanon for Dalziel and Pascoe), although I've had the first since abrinsky gave me a copy some years back. I knew he was based in Edinburgh, dour, alcoholic (casting Stott suggests as much) and a bit of a safety valve for Rankin. Aside from that, nada. There were a pile of these cheap in Oxfam the other week, so time to start the sequence.

( XVIII: Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses )

( XIX: Ian Rankin, Hide & Seek )

Oxfam have Tooth and Claw - more to the point I have - so that's next.