Oh, the blessings of being an author with too much time on his hands. I can just picture Ian Rankin sitting in the house (farm? cottage?) he and his wife bought in rural Dordogne, having whizzed through the manuscript for yet another increasingly well-written John Rebus novel and – having left behind all other employment across the British Channel and neither inclined to carpentry nor gardening – feeling his mind growing restless, in need of occupation. Now, wouldn't you have started looking for another outlet for your creative energy had you been in his spot?

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

After a good, albeit a bit uneven beginning with "Witch Hunt" – the story of a female assassin hunted by agents of the British and the French governments – things really shift into high gear with the second Jack Harvey novel, "Bleeding Hearts." Unusual is, already, its protagonist: another assassin, but this time a large part of the story is told from his perspective, and the presumed "bad guy's" first person narrative magnetically draws you in, until you end up rooting for *him* – the cool, slick, smart, presumably rather goodlooking operator – and not for the ex-cop-turned-P.I. who's been on his heels for years, and compared to whom even a classic noir gumshoe would almost look like an epitome of innocence (besides being a good deal slimmer). What is more, the story's enigmatic anti-hero suffers from a birth defect both supremely ironic and potentially fatal in his line of work: hemophilia ...

Read more on my own website, ThemisAthena.info.

Preview also cross-posted on Leafmarks.

Oh, the blessings of being an author with too much time on his hands. I can just picture Ian Rankin sitting in the house (farm? cottage?) he and his wife bought in rural Dordogne, having whizzed through the manuscript for yet another increasingly well-written John Rebus novel and – having left behind all other employment across the British Channel and neither inclined to carpentry nor gardening – feeling his mind growing restless, in need of occupation. Now, wouldn't you have started looking for another outlet for your creative energy had you been in his spot?

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

"Witch Hunt" marked the beginning of Jack Harvey's unfortunately way too short-lived career. It is the story of a female assassin – the title character – who is pursued by various agents of the British and French governments, as well as retired secret service man Dominic Elder, who has both a private and a professional bone to pick with her. The plot moves at Rankin's trademark fast pace, from Witch's arrival on Britain's South Coast (leaving her calling card by blowing up both boats she'd used to cross the Channel from France ... with their crews inside) to her first order of "real" business in Scotland, then to London, where Witch implements her plan's second phase and where her hunters have meanwhile formed a reluctant coalition, to France and Germany, for two rookie agents' unlicensed investigation of the assassin's past, and ultimately back to London, for Witch's final coup, amidst a major international conference no less.

Read more on my own website, ThemisAthena.info.

Preview also cross-posted on Leafmarks.