Disappeared - Anthony Quinn

Disappeared is Anthony Quinn's first novel, and allowances must be made.  On the positive side, a story about the 'disappeared' of the Ulster Troubles is current and compelling.  Quinn's descriptions of the shores of Lough Neagh are spellbinding and sometimes downright beautiful.  On the negative side, the plot is preposterous, there are far too many characters to keep track of, and pretty well all of them are more interesting than Quinn's lacklustre protagonist DI Celsius Daly yes, the name is the only interesting trait).  On the whole, the positives just outweigh the negatives.  I read it to the end, otherwise it wouldn't be here on my blog.  The denouement was a bit disappointing - somewhat of a deus ex machina.  Also, am I right in thinking that diesel isn't easily flammable, thus not the weapon of choice for your averagely intelligent teenage arsonist?

Personally, I won't be revisiting Inspector Daly again in a hurry.  That shouldn't put anyone else off - I hated the first Rebus novels when they came out, and look what happened with them.

The Flood - Ian Rankin

The Flood is Rankin's first novel, out of print for many years and republished in 2005 because, as Rankin says, original copies were going for silly money on the Internet.

In his introduction Rankin makes lots of excuses - it's a first novel, a young man's novel, he was doing other things at the time - but I suspect he is really very proud of it.  And so he should be.  I am notoriously not a Rebus fan, I like the 'Complaints' series and I always enjoyed his Jack Harvey thrillers.  I enjoyed The Flood hugely.  It may be old fashioned of me, perhaps even touchingly immature, but I like stories of outsiders and psychos with a touch of the macabre.  I especially like novels written during the Thatcherite Terror which encapsulate the damage done to the working classes.

What we have are Mary Miller and her son Sandy, father unknown, born when she was fifteen in a mining town in Fife.  Fifteen years later the pit has been closed and residents have had all the hope sucked out of them.  Sandy is about to experience first love.  For Mary it will be second love - she hasn't had sex or romance since the night Sandy was conceived.  But she's still only thirty or thirty-one and striking looking with her silver hair and dark eyes.  The rumour among the disaffected is that Mary is a witch.  She has so many secrets.  Is that one of them?

If there are any faults here, I am happy to forgive them.  For me, a cracking read that I devoured in just two sittings.  Highly recommended.

The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin

I never quite got Rankin.  Although I loved his Jack Harvey thrillers, the early Rebus bored me, as did all his TV incarnations, and I therefore missed the point when the series went serious.  I'll have to do some catching up, clearly.  This, however, is the second of Rankin's successor series to Rebus (albeit Rebus is now back), featuring Malcolm Fox and his colleagues from Complaints.

It took a while to draw me in - one of the problems I always had with Rankin is that he doesn't buttonhole you but expects you to stick with it.  I did stick with it and was soon full-body immersed.  It's a cracking story with its roots in a forgotten period, the Tartan terror of the 1980s.  Nowadays we have to make up or bogeymen; back then we bred our own and Rankin is clearly intrigued by the question, Where Are They Now?

Fox is a decent character, no larded-on vices, no overwrought love life.  He has a family, a sister and a father, and they are beautifully drawn, too.  Rankin wisely resists the temptation to let his narrative stray outside of Fox's knowledge.  He is in every scene - even when he isn't physically there, we experience what happened through Fox being told.

Overall, a very impressive, highly-skilled piece of work.  I will certainly lay hands on The Complaints itself, and may well try the reborn Rebus.  Highly recommended.