Currently reading
McGlue
Knife Fight and Other Struggles
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
The Good Lord Bird
Ancillary Justice
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Dissident Gardens
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Complete Novels
A weaker ending--but until the last fifty or so pages, an unmitigated pleasure. (And counting those last fifty or so pages, a mitigated pleasure.). Rebus returns, and I'm reminded that this is the one detective series that I've yet to fade on. Normally, I get the hang of the writer's style, her plotting; the central character settles into type. And I move along. But Rankin is a master of the procedural--the accumulation of detail which eventually emerges as mystery and solution. What makes his work stand out is that the observational pleasures--the attention to contemporary Scotland, the fussy precision in every stray character, the rambling lived-in-ness of each book's world--they are not mere means to the end. The books are a delight, regardless of resolution. (The only Rebus novel I found unsatisfying was the first--which seemed far more reliant on the puzzle than the population.)