heist

I have made a resolution not to read any crime novels which feature the word heist in the publisher's blurb.It seems to me that a heist story now means something like a robbery involving a comic and risible mcguffin. I have had enormous pleasure reading Ian Rankin's Rebus series several times over but rather less from one of his latest offerings, "Doors Open". In this an unlikely trio of successful people decide to commit the perfect crime within Edinburgh's art world. Not much time is wasted on the process by which each one decides to join the plot. The success or failure of the heist partly depends on an accomplice being able to reproduce exactly a group of paintings which belong to the National Gallery of Scotland. There are problems with this conceit:it is impossible to make reproductions such as these. And secondly they have to be made within a short-but unspecified time. Neither is likely to happen but for the purposes of the story we must believe that they did happen and that the results were convincing.
This objection may seem like pedantry and I suppose that any zoo-keeper looking at a crime story which featured the practices and procedures associated with looking after animals would be likely to find weaknesses in a complex plot involving the treatment of the same.The general reader will presumably overlook the details and move on.

Doors Open, Ian Rankin, Orion 2008.