Doors Open   by Ian Rankin

Rock-solid if not run-of-the-mill heist, with a mild twist at the end. Some confusion halfway through about the nature of the heist (which paintings went where?) gives the reader something to think about, but there is little else, apart from gently rising tension throughout as the gangsters become more ominous. A lot like Ocean’s Eleven but done by amateurs. Rebus is absent from this novel, and that in itself makes everything seem a bit flat.

A professor of art cajoles a recently acquainted industry colleague and a sold-up computer millionaire to work with him to acquire some paintings hidden away in the Edinburgh city museumsʼ warehouse, and they have to involve a local gangster to provide some muscle and know-how. It all goes according to plan. Then the perpetrators start getting greedy, and some of them want a bigger share of the spoils, and a Scandinavian biker gang who are owed money get one of the paintings as collateral until the money shows up.

Everything goes pear-shaped, the gangster finds he’s been stung and left with a fake which was supposed to have been left behind in the warehouse, and then starts rounding up the gang, gets them all together, and prepares to kill them. One of the gangster’s henchmen is a grass, and brings the police in at the last minute, and everyone presumably goes to prison for a suitable amount of time.

Except the professor, who disappears abroad with lots of original paintings. He was the one that set the whole thing up all along.

As to be expected from Rankin, the characterizations and interactions are spot-on. Unlike the Rebus books, you don’t really get the sense of the Edinburgh atmosphere here, nor the camaraderie, and the role of the police service is very second-fiddle. It all feels just a little bit flat, and the build-up to the heist is quite drawn out.

The book is notably old-fashioned: a cast entirely of white males, supported by extremely stereotypical women (there is one outlier who has a small influence on the story).