Mortal Causes Ian Rankin I no longer keep up with Rankin’s books as eagerly as I once did (I think I’m about three books behind the publishing schedule) and I never did get round to reading all the early books (I entered with Black and Blue). Now I was watching the documentary about Rankin, Rebus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,27,50,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-2","category-books","category-crime-fiction","category-fiction","category-rated"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1009,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/1009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span>I no longer keep up with Rankin’s books as eagerly as I once did (I think I’m about three books behind the publishing schedule) and I never did get round to reading all the early books (I entered with Black and Blue).
\nNow I was watching the documentary about Rankin, Rebus and Edinburgh on BBC Four earlier this year and Rankin was back in the Cardenden cul-de-sac he grew up in mentioned about sectarianism in small town Scotland and that he’d eventually dealt with it in a book called Mortal Causes. Now this certainly piqued my interest, because sectarianism is something I have never really understood or really experienced (at least not in it’s red raw guise) despite growing up in a town just five miles away from that Cardenden cul-de-sac.
\nSo when I saw it in a local supermarket for \u00a31.99 I couldn’t resist.
\nIt’s a bloody good book, all the better from not suffering from the bloat that later books are infected with. The brilliant device of a young man being found murdered in Mary King’s Close, terrorist execution style leads you into the plot and from then on in you’re hooked. Rankin covers a lot of ground including sectarianism, gangs and paramilitaries in this one meshing it into a coherent whole with all the skill that would lead to the amazing Black and Blue.
\nI would very much recommend this book, as a crime novel, as a look at 90’s style terrorism and as a bloody good read.<\/p>\n