A review by ridgewaygirl
Doors Open by Ian Rankin

3.0

I usually enjoy anything that Ian Rankin writes. His long-running series featuring Inspector Rebus has been consistently good and his new series, featuring an utterly un-Rebus-like detective, is even better. So I expected quite a bit from Doors Open, a stand-alone novel. Doors Open tells the story of Mike, self-made millionaire who, having sold his company, is bored. He's started collecting art, which is fun and has made him two friends, a soon-to-retire art professor and a banker who buys art for the bank he works for. They talk about the usual things people interested in art discuss and agree that art purchased for investment and stored in vaults is an abomination. From there, there is a leap to deciding that they would be more appreciative owners and, after not being able to come up with a way to rob a bank, they come up with a cunning plan to rob a museum.

This is where Rankin lost me for a while. Liberating artwork from the unappreciative mega-wealthy is one thing; stealing from the public in order to own a piece of art that can then never be shared is quite another. It turned the book from a fun crime romp into something less fun, for me, anyway. Rankin turns it around, but it took me awhile to see what he was doing. In any case, the final third of the book is brilliant in it's unraveling.