I just finished Ian Rankin's Bleeding Hearts, another one of my random library picks. This was the first Rankin book I'd read outside of the outstanding John Rebus series, and most of it was a slight letdown. I liked the structure; Rankin alternates perspectives between a hired assassin (written in the first person) and the detective hired to track him down (written in the third person). The plot was also great; the trouble was that neither the assassin nor the detective felt authentic to me. Both of them got slightly more authentic as the novel continued, but never enough to really grab me. I was surprised by this, because character development is one of Rankin's strengths in the Rebus books.
Character problems aside, Bleeding Hearts was the rare mystery where I really had no idea what the answer was to the central "who done it," and I was legitimately surprised by the ending.
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