There's something to be said for a good airport travel read. While not usually great stylistic or literary marvels, these books, found in huge numbers on airport convenience shop racks, are entertaining and well-suited to the purpose of keeping you occupied to your destination. That said, A Good Hanging and Other Stories by Ian Rankin has only one of the attributes of a good travel novel: It contains several short stories, so it is well suited for long- or short-distance travel. Otherwise, it exceeds the quality of many airport paperbacks.

Author Ian Rankin was born in Fife, Scotland, in 1960 and graduated from the University of Edinburgh. He had a number of different occupations until 1987, when he began writing novels starring the fictional Inspector Detective John Rebus of the Edinburgh police, who is featured in each of the stories in A Good Hanging.

Unique to most of the fiction we read here in the United States are novels set in a foreign location where the foreign author actually lives. Certainly there are exceptions, such as Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but most of what is presented to us by the fiction sections of American bookstore chains are from John Grisham, Richard North Patterson and others born in America who write about events set in America or, if on foreign soil, places they have visited.

Rankin lends a Scot's view to his stories, which take place in Scotland. The stories are crafted with skill and keep you guessing at how they will end until they do. The difference is that the drama is understated and the tension between what you know has happened and what will happen in the end does not have the sharp edge that many American crime-fiction novels have. That is to say, you will be kept on the edge of your seat but not quite as close to the edge as you might be used to.

Each of the stories in the book is very different. In the first story, a woman is murdered, and the police arrest a man who at first confesses and then recants his confession. A former lover becomes a target of John Rebus's attention, even though the evidence points to the man who confessed. Who did it?

In the title story, "A Good Hanging," an actor who was part of a traveling group of actors is found hanged from a gallows used as a prop for the play the group was performing as part of the Edinburgh festival. All of the members of the group are suspects as Rebus follows bit after bit of information about the relationships between the actors and the victim as well as the relationships between each member of the group. Who did it?

There is a story of the sighting of a ghost that three girls believed to be a religious figure. The park in which the ghost was sighted became a kind of shrine until Rebus discovered part of a body near the place of the sighting. Was there a murder? If so, who and why? There is, perhaps a logical explanation, but is it the right explanation?

All the questions are answered. The plots are convincing, the characters real and the action addictive. Even as one story ends, the reader looks forward to the next. The biggest disappointment is that the book does end. You can get more from him and John Rebus in the more than 12 other novels in the Rebus series. In any case, Rankin will not leave you hanging.