Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek (1990) Ian Rankin

After reading his anthology A Good Hanging, I decided to pick up another of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus books. I had ’em in the house, just never got around to reading any further in the series, because the first two books I read were quite dark, and I wasn’t in the mood for dark.

But, I enjoyed the short story collection, and so decided to pick up Hide and Seek and see what I thought.

Detective Inspector John Rebus is still a bastard, and even more so when he’s cranky. So of course he ends up with a case that isn’t going well, and Superintendent Watson has decided Rebus is the perfect person to head up the drugs task force, simply because his brother is serving time for drugs crimes.

A body–looking initially like a simple heroin overdose–is found in an abandoned house. Unfortunately, the circumstance surrounding the death–and the way the body was laid out–seem to show that something else was going on, and this was more than a case of a junkie ODing.

It is at times difficult to like Rebus. He can be a completely self-centered jerk. But he also seems to care about the crimes he is involved in getting solved, although that may be more out of stubbornness and curiosity than a sense of justice.

The mystery here is intriguing, and ends up going much further than a simple heroin OD. Not 100% certain about the coincidences, but it was interesting and engrossing.

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