Ian Rankin has written 25 novels, a number of them (inc. the Rebus series) bestsellers and award winners.    Before he settled on crime fiction, Rankin wrote a variety of books, some of them thrillers like Witch Hunt.

Witch Hunt was an early novel, written under the pseudonym Jack Harvey.    It follows Special Services Officers in a pursuit of a terrorist nicknamed Witch.   She is an assassin, a shadowy figure that MI5 has been hunting for years.     A team of detectives and counter-terrorists follow faint clues to track down Witch’s trail in Scotland, France, England, and Germany.   With a Summit of world leaders in London, the team is hard-pressed to track down the elusive target in time.

We follow Dominic Elder (a retired M15 Agent) who has a personal reason for finding Witch, and a team of detectives, including a novice investigator and a French agent as they follow hunches and faint leads, taking chances with their careers in the hierarchical system of the Special Branches.      The novel is plot-driven with a bit of character development, but it misses the mark on being engaging or exciting.

It was interesting, but not highly recommended with a score of 4.0 out of 5.0 stars4.0

An excerpt/sample: