Let It Bleed

Let It Bleed starts with a car chase out of a Hollywood action movie, a chase that ends with John Rebus's boss in the hospital and the men they were chasing diving off an icy bridge onto the deck of a police boat (as the coroner says, at least it saved the department the case of a water search).  Don't worry, after that Ian Rankin returns to his familiar ground, political and police corruption against the backdrop of Edinburgh's dreary weather.  A few days after the chase, crash, and suicide, Rebus is called out to investigate the suicide of a recently released, terminally ill prisoner who chose a local councillor's open hours as his place of death.  Rebus thinks they're connected, and finding himself on an involuntary vacation tells him he's right.  The plot was a bit convoluted, involving tech start-ups (the book was written nearly 20 years ago, and there's a prescient scene where Rebus's drinking buddy claims that eventually we'll all have pocket sized computers) and sham contracts for retraining unemployed workers.  Rankin sufficiently supported his conclusion, but I liked the book more for Rebus than for the plot.