Let it Bleed

I’ve been finding it quite hard to settle down and read anything book-wise since I retired: reading lots of stuff on the Net. But I skim a lot there too.

The books and magazines I’ve got from the Library Bus (which conveniently stops just around the corner from our house every Monday afternoon) have all been pretty much fizzlers, stuff I can't be bothered getting into.

So I’ll just have to go through my own bookshelves and see what I haven’t read – or haven’t read for a long time. In the light of that, I picked up and read Ian Rankin’s Let it bleed over the last couple of days. That was good. It was one of the bunch of Rankin titles we bought and read in England, back in 2007, I think, and by the time it was its turn to be read I’d had enough of Rankin and Rebus for the time being (having read five or six in a row).

It’s a bit shorter than some of his other books, I think, but it’s very fast-paced, and as always there are a heap of things going on and gradually connecting together. It's less gruesome than some of his other stories, which was also a plus. He’s very good at plotting, as well as providing strong characterisations. And he seems to know so much. Seemingly some of his earlier books had police procedural errors – but who would know, except a policeman. By the time this book was written he had someone on hand to check those details.

I’ve obviously read the series all out of order...just looking at Rankin’s (excellent) website, I can see that Let it Bleed comes in the middle somewhere of about twenty Rebus titles, and I’ve read some of the later ones. Not to worry. They’re all fairly self-contained, and you remember as you go along who's who.