It is a long book at more than 550 pages but it is action packed so if you love to read, that should cause you no issues.

Our travels will include time in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Shetland and even the oilfields in the North Sea. Set in Scotland, the author helps us visit his Scotland from the comfort of our arm chairs. He is searching for a mass murderer nicknamed Bible John on a cold case from the 1960s and 1970s and he is searching for a copycat murderer who has been nicknamed Bible Johnny. He is a drinking man with sometimes questionable scruples who is determined to get the job done regardless of who is in the way.īlack and Blue finds our anti-hero unofficially working four cases at the same time. He is anti-social and struggles with relationships. I did not know what was meant by that last term, anti-hero, so I googled it and Wikipedia shares that “ An antihero is a main character in a story who lacks conventional heroic qualities and attributes such as idealism, courage and morality.” Inspector Rebus is a hard-working, hardened police officer and former SAS officer now coping in self-destruct mode with what life has thrown at him. In her class notes, our instructor Stefani Nielson calls the book “ post-Christie,” “ British realism noir” and she says that it features a “ working class anti-hero.” Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue is a fictional detective story, written in 1997 and based firmly in the Scotland of the 1990s. In this case, what it looks like did not matter because this book is one of the books that will be discussed in the late fall class I am taking in Ottawa through Carleton University’s Learning in Retirement program called Classics of Detective Fiction: From the 1960s to Today. Of course, once you have a book in your hand, it matters not a whit what the cover looks like though the cover may have helped that book find its way into your hands in the first place.

I suppose that is what happens to a successful book as it gains some age. This book, however, seems to have had a lot of different looks.

I am surprised though I know that different book formats come with different covers. Interesting the number of covers Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue has had.

Black & blue ian rankin