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| | immediacy: Black and Blue |
 | | The majority of this book concerns oil platforms out in the North Sea, and Rebus does get to visit the Shetlands, which we won't get to see, even though we'd like to. |
 | | Rankin also, like James Ellroy in The Black Dahlia, uses an actual murder case as the core of the book, then layers on additional mysteries that both inform and interact with the facts as generally known. |
 | | This is the kind of thing that Ed McBain made popular, but Rankin's take on it is slightly less by-the-numbers and, as such, seems a little more real. |
| www.engel-cox.org /text/black_and_blue.html (452 words) |
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