2006: #109 – The Falls (Ian Rankin)

Book #109 was The Falls, the 12th book in Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus series. The back of the book reads:

When the privileged daughter of a merchant banker disappears, a search through her e-mails uncovers her secret life-and a bizarre correspondence with an on-line game player who delights in macabre puzzles. The first game was for the girl. The next one is for Inspector John Rebus, a man haunted by the impenetrable riddles of his own troubled past. But the lead is soon complicated by an unexpected twist.

A hand-carved wooden doll in an eight-inch coffin is found on the grounds of the victim’s home-a clue that links her vanishing to the deaths of four other women, and to a centuries-old offense that still scars the grisly history of Edinburgh.

From the shadowy world of an Internet stalker to the quicksand of lies in the missing girl’s dissolute family, Rebus is led into the soul of evil. And to a shattering crime that only he, a man who treads the fine line between investigative brilliance and personal oblivion, could ever hope to understand.

This book took me forever to get through. It’s the 12th book in the Rebus series, but the first one I’ve read. Rankin is Scottish, and the book is set in Edinburgh, so there was a lot of language that I wasn’t familiar with which made the reading a bit slow. It felt very dense.

Storywise, I guess it wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t really crazy about any of the characters, but I didn’t hate them. I just didn’t relate. I thought I had the “whodunit” figured out early, but I was WRONG. So that’s good, at least. It wasn’t predictable.

The acceptableness of the story aside, I probably won’t seek out any more in this series. I like my crime novels to be a faster read.

Book count: 109 | Page count: 498 | Word count: 152,188