Picked this up at my local Safeway where they are selling "gently used books" for fifty cents each to raise funds for a seniors' Christmas dinner.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I'm taking this book to our monthly gathering at the Park Theatre Cafe. If no one takes it home, it will be left on the shelf.

Another Ian Rankin book but this time short stories. Sounded too interesting to pass up. Thanks Kismet.

I'm not a big fan of short stories. Often they leave me unsatisfied as if they haven't finished the story they started to tell. There are exceptions. Most science fiction authors are also great writers of short stories. And I love Alice Munro's short fiction. I think writers who try short stories have to be top notch in order to succeed. So I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Ian Rankin can write a great short story.

Some of these stories are about John Rebus, the idiosyncratic Edinburgh police detective. In fact, the last story, Death is not the End seemed so familiar to me that I had to go back to the Rebus books I have read. Sure enough in Dead Souls the same story about the missing son of high school friends shows up as one of the plot lines. The one distinction is that the mother, who used to be Rebus' girlfriend, is named Janis here is called Janice there. Perhaps Rankin realized that it was more likely that a girl the same age as John Rebus would have been named the more traditional way. Anyway, it provides an interesting view into how a novelist constructs a book using some details that have percolating through the brain for some time.

A couple of the other stories have to do with art heists which of course was the subject of Rankin's first non-Rebus book after Rebus retired, Doors Open. Obviously another thing that has been percolating through his brain for a while.

There is a short introduction by Rankin in which he talks about how some of the stories came to be. I referred back to it several times as I was reading the book.

I'm going to pass this book off to my librarian friend who is another Rankin fan. When I told her I had a book of short stories by Ian Rankin she was quite intrigued.

My librarian friend gave this back to me with a note that said:

Thanks! Loved it!

I have no immediate plans for this so I'll mark it available.

I left this book by the coffee dispensers. It's been quite a while since I left a book here so I hope it gets picked up. This release is for the 2011 Never Judge a Book by its Cover release challenge - Week 4 (no living thing on the cover) and for the 2011 Keep Them Moving Challenge.