As you may imagine my little friend Geoffrey the mad mohican giraffe "Oi stop calling me mad, you twit King!" Ok, my little friend Geoffrey the giraffe, with the natty mohican haircut, likes dark things, not dark as in no light, because quite frankly he is scared of the dark and sleeps with the light on, the other kind of dark, the one that you cannot put your finger on, you know dark, black, the nasty underside to life; that sort of thing. So it was Geoffrey that got me reading Ian Rankin's books about a rather grumpy Scottish police officer called John Rebus, or just Rebus to most of us. There are a whole series of these, whodunit, mystery, crime, ...  Read the complete review

After hearing so many people recommend Ian Rankin, I decided to give him a try. I picked "The Falls" for the simple reason that a friend offered to lend me a copy. I enjoyed every minute of the book and am now ready to read more Rankin. The Falls is a crime novel set in Edinburgh and is one of Rankin's Rebus novels. Although it's not the first in the series (that would be Knots and Crosses, and The Falls is number 12), it was very easy to get into the book without having read the others and I didn't have any trouble figuring out who everyone was. The book is about a student, Philippa Balfour, who goes missing just before going to meet a ...  Read the complete review

I've just had an Amazon splurge and treatedmyself to several of Ian Rankin's novels about his Edinburgh detective, Inspector John Rebus. I finished "The Falls" in the early hours of this morning. I think it's the best Rebus novel I've read so far – and that's saying something! Philippa 'Flip' Balfour is twenty years old and missing. Her father is a wealthy banker and the ears that he's bent have ensured that the police have pulled out all the stops in the search for her. There are two main lines of enquiry. Rebus's protégé, DC Siobhan Clarke, is investigating the mysterious Quizmaster, who has involved the missing student in an ...  Read the complete review

Eight days in Devon, my favourite English seaside County. Beautiful weather, dry and sunny all week, lovely company and a wonderful place to stay. Sounds perfect doesn’t it? Well it would have been if I hadn’t have got food poisoning after two days – the very thought of a clotted cream tea still makes me feel nauseous. So I ended up for a large part of my holiday unable to venture more than fifty metres or to put it another way, twenty seconds from the bathroom. Looking on the bright side, as I always endeavour to do, there were some pretty miserable compensations. Firstly I survived without alcohol for five days and now class myself ...  Read the complete review

‘The Falls’ is the latest in Ian Rankin’s series of crime thrillers featuring Detective John Rebus, and for me it’s one of the best. For those who don’t know, Rebus is an Edinburgh detective who drinks too much, broods too much, has too many regrets, too much stubbornness, too bad a temper and a streak of individualism which constantly lands him in hot water. He is loved and loathed in equal measure by his colleagues. ‘The Falls’ centres around the disappearance of a wealthy banker’s daughter called ‘Flip’, and the appearance of a series of tiny coffins in strange places over a period of ...  Read the complete review