Summary
Summary
Three friends descend upon an art auction in search of some excitement. Mike Mackenzie-retired software mogul, bachelor and fine art enthusiast-wants something that money can't buy. Fellow art-lover Allan Cruickshank is bored with his banking career and burdened by a painful divorce. And Robert Gissing, an art professor, is frustrated that so many paintings stay hidden in corporate boardrooms, safes and private apartments. After the auction-and a chance encounter with crime boss Chib Calloway-Robert and Allan suggest the "liberation" of several paintings from the National Gallery, hoping Mike will dissuade them. Instead, he hopes they are serious.
As enterprising girlfriends, clever detectives, seductive auctioneers and a Hell's Angel named Hate enter the picture, Ian Rankin creates a highly-charged thriller, a faced-past story of second guesses and double crosses that keep changing the picture, right until the harrowing finish.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Scottish author Rankin's intricately plotted heist thriller, software millionaire Mike Mackenzie, high-end banker Allan Cruikshank, and college art professor Robert Gissing devise a plan to "liberate" forgotten works of art from a warehouse storing the overflow from Edinburgh's museum collections. The trio commissions an art student nursing an antiestablishment grudge to paint fakes to swap for the originals, and Mackenzie's chance meeting with schoolmate Charlie "Chib" Calloway, now one of the city's most notorious gangsters, allows the group access to muscle and weapons. But cracks soon appear in the plan, with an inquisitive detective inspector, who's been on Calloway's trail for months, getting too close for comfort. Using the smalltown feel of Edinburgh to advantage, Rankin (Exit Music) gives his caper novel a claustrophobic edge while injecting enough twists, turns, and triple crosses that even the most astute reader will be surprised at the outcome. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
For a really successful novelist, there can be few scarier things than writing your first book after killing off a long, vastly popular series. After Aubrey-Maturin, where next? Harry Potter's pensioned off before he needs hair restorer, but does that leave his globally famous creator anywhere to go? Different authors have different solutions. Patrick O'Brian died just before his series ended, which was characteristically shrewd, if a little extreme. Some authors change tack or invent a new hero/heroine/fantasy world. After 20 years Ian Rankin, onlie begetter of Rebus, seems barely to have paused before charging straight back to the keyboard. He appears not even to have had the common decency to go through a mid-life crisis and disappear for a year to drink himself silly. Instead he's produced a new thriller with new characters, and only familiar geography to reassure the fan. Brave man. For this is not quite the Edinburgh of Rebus. The unforgettably self-hating, chewed-up-and-spitting-out Scottish detective, slouching with hangover groans through shades of American film noir and shadows of Stevenson and Hogg, carried his city around with him. He was dry enough to make sardony a word and sucked the sunlight out of Scotland's capital. The Edinburgh of Rankin's new novel also has its skirt of pebble-dashed, scummy menace, its forgotten council schemes, piss-stained billiard halls and awesomely violent thugs. But it seems a touch more balanced without that half-mad, grey-and-liver-coloured face glaring back at it. The story starts with a far lighter touch, too. Three men dream up the perfect art heist. One is a computer millionaire, retired early with his toys and now bored. One is a grouchy professor of art. One is a nervous banker who feels life is passing him by. There's an almost John Buchan mood: three chaps settling down for a final big adventure, egging one another on as they knock back their drams. Their scheme is both simple and clever; I won't give it away. Yet I felt slightly disappointed. The feeling quickly passed. One of the problems of a long and successful series, whether it's about sailors or child magicians or detectives, is that eventually the characters and the setting start to overwhelm the narrative. What Rankin has done is to free himself from the detail and murk that a Rebus devotee would expect, and to plunge into pure, fast storytelling. Here, barely a sentence, indeed barely a syllable, is wasted. The characterisation is as much as the narrative needs and no more - a couple of facts, physical traits or jokes so that the reader remembers who's who, and then on with the tale. Because Rankin is a master story teller, that means the reader is quickly swept up and carried along. I read this in one sitting, on a swelteringly hot beach in Greece; I kept meaning to do other things - find a beer, fetch a sunhat, check the BlackBerry - but somehow had to keep putting them off until I finished this chapter; and then the next; until I'd reached the end. By then, I'm glad to report, the genteel Edinburgh of the amateur art thieves had collapsed into a gory spiral of loutish menace, violence and mayhem. It was a good idea to set a story in the Edinburgh art world: it is rich, introverted and hasn't, to my knowledge, been skewered before. Those who know their Scottish painting will enjoy visualising that early 20th-century painter "Monboddo" - a bit Cadell, a whiff of Fergusson too - and the works of that lugubrious Victorian portrayer of cold sheep, "Utterson". There are jokes about painters as various as Jack Vettriano and Banksy. The final third of the novel is a heart-pounding and relentless rumble as our heroes find their options running out, and the reader wonders, a little late, who the heroes really are. Light social satire gives way to fear and fists. Again, I will give nothing away - except to say that for anyone toying with the idea of crime as a form of boredom therapy, this story is not, on balance, an encouragement. Assuming you're still allowed to smoke in hell, even Rebus will spend a happy hour or two with Doors Open Andrew Marr's most recent book is A History of Modern Britain (Pan). To order Doors Open for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-rankin.1 Brave man. For this is not quite the Edinburgh of Rebus. The unforgettably self-hating, chewed-up-and-spitting-out Scottish detective, slouching with hangover groans through shades of American film noir and shadows of Stevenson and Hogg, carried his city around with him. He was dry enough to make sardony a word and sucked the sunlight out of Scotland's capital. The Edinburgh of [Ian Rankin]'s new novel also has its skirt of pebble-dashed, scummy menace, its forgotten council schemes, piss-stained billiard halls and awesomely violent thugs. But it seems a touch more balanced without that half-mad, grey-and-liver-coloured face glaring back at it. By then, I'm glad to report, the genteel Edinburgh of the amateur art thieves had collapsed into a gory spiral of loutish menace, violence and mayhem. It was a good idea to set a story in the Edinburgh art world: it is rich, introverted and hasn't, to my knowledge, been skewered before. Those who know their Scottish painting will enjoy visualising that early 20th-century painter "Monboddo" - a bit Cadell, a whiff of Fergusson too - and the works of that lugubrious Victorian portrayer of cold sheep, "Utterson". There are jokes about painters as various as Jack Vettriano and Banksy. - Andrew Marr.
Kirkus Review
With Detective Inspector John Rebus (Exit Music, 2008, etc.) rusticated by mandatory retirement, Rankin offers a stand-alone about dishonor among thieves. At 37, Mike Mackenzie has more money and time than he knows what to do with. The combination isn't certain to spell trouble, but that's the way to bet it. Having sold his partnership in a white-hot software company, Mike takes his place among Edinburgh's most bored eligible bachelors. By contrast, noted art expert Robert Gissing is far from bored; people with a mission seldom are. Prof. Gissing views himself as a freedom fighter on behalf of artworks. Too often, he insists, masterpieces are imprisoned, locked away from public appreciation in fat-cat boardrooms or neglected and half-forgotten in musty warehouses. He proposes that Mike join a liberation movement: "We'd be freeing them, not stealing them. We'd be doing it out of love." For Mike, it's a wake-up call and a siren song, and his heart races as he prepares to strike a blow. The team soon assembled includes a top-notch forger and a savvy bottom-feeder ready to supply whatever muscle is needed; clearly, not all team members are in it for the love of art. The heist is meticulously planned and carried out with impressive efficiency, but it's when the thieves fall out that the fun begins. Not up to Rankin's bestRebus, we miss youbut certainly entertaining. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Mike Mackenzie is thirty-seven years old, rich and bored. Having sold his software company, he hasn't found a replacement for the thrill of high-stakes entrepreneurship; only collecting art satisfies his soul. Then barroom banter with friends Why should great paintings languish in warehouses when they could belong to people who properly appreciate them? suggests another pastime. Talk turns serious, and soon the unlikely thieves are ready to execute their plan, swapping originals for fakes on Doors Open Day, when nonpublic institutions offer tours. Mackenzie feels alive again, but as the number of conspirators grows to include professional criminals, the rank amateurs' perfect crime begins to unravel. Fans of Rankin's excellent, just-ended John Rebus series will likely be disappointed by this offering. While Rankin builds some suspense with a dogged DI named Ransome and a Hell's Angel named Hate the tension remains perfectly bearable. Mackenzie seems unfazed by the threat of jail time, characters are glib when they ought to be scared, and the tepid ending takes a page, if you will, right out of Scooby-Doo: in danger, Mackenzie buys time by explaining the plot, while the villains assist him by bloviating about how painful everyone's death will be when eventually inflicted. Finally, in a novel where art forgery plays a starring role, the details of the forgery are too sketchy. We can't help but wonder if Rankin is like his character here: having retired Rebus, he's still looking for a new thrill to equal the old one.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I love the rationale for the museum heist three Edinburgh art lovers pull off in Ian Rankin's coolly executed caper novel, DOORS OPEN (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown, $24.99). Mike Mackenzie, a filthy rich but terminally bored software entrepreneur, convinces himself that he and his pals are performing a civic service by "liberating" some half-dozen paintings from the National Gallery warehouse where they currently languish. If you follow the logic of these self-entitled snobs - in an argument advanced by a distinguished but disgruntled scholar and quickly adopted by Mackenzie and a banker friend - it would be a mission of mercy to "help some of those poor imprisoned paintings to escape" by appropriating them and leaving forgeries in their place. Once Mackenzie enlists the professional know-how (and muscle) of a gangster named Chib Calloway, the heist goes off without a hitch. But there are so many human variables at work - from the art student who can't resist leaving a whimsical clue in his otherwise perfect forgeries to the foreign mercenary who collects a painting as debt collateral - that some loose cannon is bound to sabotage the project. There's also a certain Inspector Ransome of the Lothian and Borders Police to contend with, but you needn't bother your head about him. (Rankin certainly doesn't, even though he spoonfeeds plenty of unearned information to this weaselly detective.) In true "Ocean's Eleven" spirit, the only genuinely involving character dynamic is the one between the two principal criminal collaborators: Mackenzie, who gets a charge from committing a crime, and Chib, who discovers a new racket in fine art. Sensing in Chib "a hunger for something - knowledge, perhaps," Mackenzie wonders if the gangster "was beginning to realize just how narrow his world had become. And just maybe, Mike conceded, the same thing was happening to him." With the exigencies of the plot bearing down on him, Rankin doesn't give this relationship enough play time before the inevitable violent reversal. But the midlife career crisis theme - which applies just as neatly to other key conspirators in the art fraud, as well as the two rival detectives fighting over the case - adds a piquant touch to the usual genre conventions. The forbidden thrill of the illicit adventure also indicates something about Rankin's state of mind, now that he seems to have cut loose his brooding series hero, John Rebus, and stepped away from the gritty police procedurals that brought him fame and fortune. Maybe it's time for fun and games. Those spinal chills generated by BLACKLANDS (Simon & Schuster, $23) are partly inspired by the grim nature of the story Belinda Bauer tells in her first novel. Essentially, it's the dual character study of a young boy and a grown man drawn to each other through their separate obsessions, neither of them healthy. Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb is a lonely, sensitive child who becomes convinced that the only way to restore love and laughter to his miserable family is to find the body of his mother's brother, who went missing almost 20 years earlier at the age of 11, presumably the victim of a serial killer named Arnold Avery. After exhausting himself digging holes on the moor, Steven gets in touch with Avery himself and awakens the worst instincts of this manipulative killer, who is determined to escape from Dartmoor Prison and get his hands on the boy. For all the unnerving aspects of this appalling story, there's a certain morbid pleasure to be had from its claustrophobic atmosphere. Bauer casually mentions that in this desolate countryside "children disappeared all the time, and a few turned up dead." And some, like Steven, still feel the chill in their bones. There's precious little crime in THE BAD BOOK AFFAIR (Harper, paper, $13.9.9), the latest entry in Ian Sansom 's beguiling series about the adventures of Israel Armstrong, "a North London Jewish vegetarian liberal freethinker" who has somehow wound up driving a mobile library around "the northernmost coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland." But while there's no crime to speak of in the town of Tumdrum, there's plenty of criminal mischief done to books and the readers of books by the leaders of this "dour, largely Presbyterian, muttering community." The most egregious offense may be the "Unshelved" book category - including beleaguered titles like "A Clockwork Orange" - that are kept out of sight lest they plant ideas in impressionable minds. Indeed, a troubled teenager disappears after signing out, from this pernicious material, Philip Roth's "American Pastoral." Israel is properly horrified and very, very amusing. James Thompson's SNOW ANGELS (Putnam, $24.95) sounds like something connoisseurs of macabre crime fiction might pounce on - the gruesome account, narrated by a tough but not unfeeling detective, of a savage murder committed against a beautiful young woman during kaamos, the polar night that descends on Lapland every winter. Some aspects of the novel are worth a pounce, especially the stark vignettes of daily life in near or total darkness. The American-born author, who lives in Finland, doesn't flinch from portraying his characters in various stages of drunkenness, truculence and madness, and some of these portraits are hard to take - harder, even, to shake. But Thompson's skills desert him when he ventures beyond these realistic set pieces, and there's nothing remotely believable about his outlandish plot. In Ian Rankin's latest novel, a bored software executive 'liberates' paintings from the National Gallery.
Library Journal Review
Rankin's (www.ianrankin.net) follow-up to his 17th and final Inspector Rebus novel, Exit Music (Audio Reviews, LJ 1/09)-also available from Hachette Audio and read by James Macpherson-is his first stand-alone thriller since the pseudonymously written Blood Hunt (1994). Here, retired software millionaire/art lover Mike Mackenzie enlists the aid of a banker, a distinguished art historian, an art student, and Edinburgh's leading gangster to rob the National Gallery of Scotland. Mix in a suspicious police inspector, the student's greedy girlfriend, and a particularly vicious Scandinavian thug, and the thieves find themselves in a spot of bother. Rankin offers a bit more humor here than in his beloved Inspector Rebus series; his skill at characterization remains top-notch. Macpherson varies his Scots burr depending on the given character's background, with some of the criminals having close to impenetrable accents. Fans of Rankin, heists, Edinburgh, and art history should find this entertaining.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.