Journalist James Reeve is found dead in his car, an apparent suicide. But his brother, Gordon, is not so sure about that. The circumstances up to and surrounding James’s death suggest murder instead, so Gordon puts his former SAS skills to use. This is fortunate for James, to be avenged, and less fortunate for any of James’s enemies…

I found this a tense read that held my attention fairly well. It is probably my second favourite of the Jack Harvey novels. Gordon makes for a resourceful protagonist, perhaps a little scary, but an impressive one to watch as he goes about solving the mystery of his brother’s death. ( )

veterans, brothers, murder

Ian Rankin wrote three books under the pseudonym of Jack Harvey. I presume he used a pseudonym because these three books are quite a bit different from his John Rebus detective fiction. Nevertheless, they captivate the reader just as much as the books for which he is more famous.

Gordon Reeves now lives on an island in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland, and offers survival courses to men who want to be tough. He was a soldier in the elite SAS squad and knows a thing or two about survival. His brother, Jim, is a freelance journalist. Gordon doesn't know too much about Jim's work but that is about to change when he gets a call from a cop in San Diego saying his brother is dead. The death has been ruled a suicide but that just doesn't seem right to Gordon. He wants to see what Jim was working on but his laptop and notes have disappeared. There are some clues that it has to do with organophosphates, chemicals manufactured by Co-World Chemicals. Gordon suspects that Co-World (or CWC for short) had Jim killed to prevent him from exposing them. He is determined to investigate until he knows the truth. A sideways glance at a man in a car at his brother's funeral makes him think that he may be up against a man he thought was dead, a man who was also in the SAS. That ups the ante for him.

The action takes us from the US to London to France back to the US and finally to Scotland. I sure hope Reeves chalked up some frequent flyer points. ( )

I thought I'd won the lottery when I discovered a previously unheard-of novel by one of my favorites, Ian Rankin, on the shelf at the local library. Alas, Blood Hunt wasn't recent output by Rankin, but was actually written under a pen-name back in 1995. That would normally not be a problem, but the writing and plot were both well below the level of quality I've seen in his more recent work.

The story line itself was OK at a high level. A Brit journalist with personal problems was working on an incendiary story of some sort, but commits suicide on the US west coast. The circumstances seem a bit murky to his surviving brother, an ex-SAS guy who runs a survivalist training camp in Great Britain. It becomes his crusade to prove that his brother was murdered, and the remainder of the book is involved in that effort. As I mentioned, the writing was mediocre, but the real weakness was in the various sub-plots that impinged upon his search for truth. The conclusion was fairly contrived and the actual end of the book was very abrupt.

If you're new to Ian Rankin, start with the early novels in the Rebus series. The one thing Blood Hunt gave me was an appreciation for how much Rankin has grown as a writer. ( )

An Audible book read by an excellent narrator. Not as good as Rankin's Rebus series, but an entertaining, fast-paced, far-fetched plot. ( )