Exit Music

Exit Music
Author: Ian Rankin 2007 421 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started September 25 2008, Finished September 30 2008.

This novel, the last in a series of about 20 (none of the others of which I’ve read), features the police inspector John Rebus of Edinburgh ,struck me as a Scottish version of the Arkady Renko books and my ho-hum reaction to this book made me question my attachment to that other series.
This book featured, as does the Renko series, a world weary protagonist/anti-hero at odds with his bosses but with a preternatural aptitude for and visceral commitment to solving unusual murders. As with Renko books, this one spends some time detailing the political and economic backdrop of the place and time (Scotland in the mid 2000’s, a time of rising nationalist/separatist impulses). Perhaps as with the Renko books, much of the pleasure of new volume comes from allusions to those which preceded it and if so, I missed out starting on the final edition. That said, I didn’t find the central mysteries particularly compelling, the resolution of one being somewhat arbitrary and unengaging and the other quite obvious.

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For a while now, he’d know the truth -- that it wasn’t so much the underworld you had to fear as the overworld. (208)