If I'd had my thinking cap on, I'd've held off reading this
book until we shade into police procedural month--is that
definitely on?
Anyway, I've run out of on-hand
new-to-me authors, although I still plan to acquire Peace and
maybe some others. I've read a couple of Ian Rankins and have
been sort of on the fence as to whether they're police
procedurals. Rebus has seemed to either take off on his own
or be sent off; he is often only very loosely affiliated with
the police department. I can see that the series isn't the
exemplar of police procedurals while still allowing it in my
version of that category.
_Knots and Crosses,_ the first book
in the series, clearly is a police procedural, with
realistic-sounding division of labor, rank structures,
relations with the press, and shift work. Yet this book also
has more raw Rankin than later series books--his family
background, his army problems, his religious inclinations,
and his self-control attempts.
The plot involves a clever,
clue-seeding serial strangler of girls--one of those that's
implausible in retrospect--but it worked perfectly fine while
I was reading.
Anyone who hasn't read any
Rankin--probably nobody on this list--ought to start with
this book because it provides so much backstory.
Joy, beginning Mina's _Exile_
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