This is the second Rebus book by Ian Rankin which I’ve read and I’m sure I’ll be reading quite a few more of them. To be truthful, my heart did sink just a wee bit at the beginning because for a minute it seemed a bit purple prose-ish but he soon settled down into a more relaxed style.

I don’t want to say too much about the storyline because I know that quite a few people are reading Let it Bleed. Judith (Reader in the Wilderness) and her Ken have been enjoying it. Suffice to say that Rebus is the passenger in a police car on the Forth Road Bridge on a freezing winter night. He and his colleague are chasing a Ford Cortina which might have the Lord Provost’s daughter in its boot. The Ford is heading for Fife and they are determined to stop it from reaching there because they want the ‘collar’.

But that’s just the beginning and big business and politics play their parts in this book too.

I get completely engrossed in good books and at one point Rebus was doing a helluva amount of hard drinking and I actually found myself thinking – Thank God I’ve got a bottle of Irn Bru in the pantry – which is a well known Scottish fizzy drink, famous as a hangover cure!

I can’t think of anything particularly ‘Scottish’ which would have to be explained to anyone, but I have heard some English people prononunce the Irish name Siobhan (Rebus’s sidekick) as – See o ban- when of course it should be Shivon.

I hope that you’re reading this, Joan Kyler of Pennsylvania, whose name always comes with a soundtrack in my head – (65-0-0-0) because you might like to see if you can borrow this one from your library, especially as it features that ‘scary bridge’ which you drove over some years ago.

I think Ian Rankin is particularly good at conveying just how cold it feels in the east of Scotland during the winter. It’s the wind chill that gets you and as he says sandblasts you, so it’s always a lot colder than the thermometer says.

This is one of my favourite Irn Bru adverts. Have a look if you want a laugh.