Blood Hunt: A Jack Harvey Novel [Abridged] [Audiobook] (Audio Cassette)

A brilliant story, intracately woven with twists and turns, leaving you on the edge of seat. Action & Mystery - Ian Rankin's best book yet.

The Jack Harvey books are a completely different style, and equally enjoyable. His writing is first class, sometimes stopping me in my tracks with a brilliant sentence.

His Jack Harvey novels are very good reads, maybe not qutie as good as Rebus, but still very enjoyable. Blood Hunt is probably the best one, although i have enjoyed all three very much.

It was very interesting to learn more about Gordon Reeve (who some readers might remember as being the killer from Knots and Crosses). However, if you are to read this, you must forget the events of Knots and Crosses, and with this book they have been completely forgotten, and Rankin instead builds upon Reeve's character. It builds a nice parrallell universe of "what if". What if Knots and Crosses had never happened? How would Gordon Reeve be?

Anyway, all in all a very good book. One of Rankin's best.

The result of the aforementioned process, which Rankin describes in the foreword of a 2000 compilation uniting all three novels in one volume, were a series of thrillers written under the pseudonym Jack Harvey: Jack for his newborn son, Harvey for his wife's maiden name.

In "Blood Hunt," the last of the three books, fans of Inspector Rebus meet an old acquaintance; George Reeve from the first Rebus novel, "Knots and Crosses." Only here he's the good guy - well, mostly; because there isn't such a thing as a clean-cut "good guy" in *any* Ian Rankin novel. In any event, "Blood Hunt" introduces us to Reeve's back story; his life as an outdoors survival teacher, and his own memories and nightmares of his service with the SAS - after we've already gotten a fair share of Rebus's in "Knots and Crosses" - particularly the Falklands campaign, during which he met the man who would soon turn out to be his biggest nemesis; as much as Reeve will later become a nemesis to Rebus.

Further, we learn that Reeve had a brother; a journalist on the trail of a story centering around a chemical company headquartered in San Diego. When that brother is murdered, Reeve's instincts as a hunter are awakened - and like a bull terrier he pits himself to the heels of those responsible for the murder and doesn't let go until he has brought them to justice: *his* kind of justice, that is, which isn't necessarily that of the police, but one they understand only too well. The SAS call themselves Nietzsche's gentlemen - believing in the self-proclaimed amoralist's teachings that the will to power is all that matters and all that controls life; and the novel's conclusion is very much in keeping with that adage.

As a back story to the first Rebus book, "Blood Hunt" works only just so - while the essential facts are in synch with Reeve's and Rebus's SAS past, to truly click with "Knots and Crosses," this book would have had to be written about a decade earlier, or vice versa, which in turn wouldn't square with the later Rebus books' historical and political references ... you get the picture. Read as a stand-alone, however, this is a tightly-plotted thriller, every bit as violent as the second Jack Harvey novel, "Bleeding Hearts" (there's a reason why blood figures in both books' titles) and, while based on a conspiracy theory that easily dates it as a mid-1990s release, as strong as both "Bleeding Hearts" and the best of the Rebus books on characters and settings (Scotland to San Diego, London, France and back, with - literally - a cliffhanger finale on the Outer Hebrides' rough mountainous territory). And then there's that children's rhyme that I don't think I'll ever hear quite the same way I used to ...

Although I'm happy enough for Rankin's success with Inspector Rebus and wouldn't want any story featuring Edinburgh's finest (and most hard-drinking) D.I. missing from my bookcases, in a way I regret that Rankin had to shelve Jack Harvey after only three books. So just in case, Mr. Rankin, in the unlikely event that you should ever resurrect that alter ego (or write a non-Rebus novel under your own name): I promise I'll read that one, too, and probably with just as much pleasure as any of your other books.