The Complaints
by Ian Rankin
This is without doubt a fairly bleak and depressing book and as such is evidently a reasonable reflection of its historical context.
Following his highly successful Rebus stories Rankin sets out to establish a new character in the person of “a bear of a man”, Inspector Malcolm Fox, an intentionally different type of policeman.
It was generally agreed that this was not entirely successfully achieved.
Some of us had read some of the Rebus novels and found this new venture overly wordy and lacking in tension and for many it failed to engage.
The setting, Edinburgh in the grip of the recession, was interesting but the book has no literary pretensions being quite clearly a genre novel.
As such, even for those in the group who might consider themselves aficionados of the detective novel, it fell short of its potential.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of Rankin fans who will no doubt await eagerly the next Fox exploit and many of us felt that it had been written with an eye clearly fixed on a TV adaptation.
NS. July 2012
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