Twelve terrific stories starring Detective Inspector John Rebus: 'an outstanding creation'(Daily Telegraph). His home city of Edinburgh is not just the tartan tearooms and cobbled streets of the tourist brochures, but a modern urban conurbation with the full range of criminals and their victims – blackmailers, peeping Toms, and more than one kind of murderer. It is a city that gives birth to crimes of passion, accident and long-hidden jealousy.
A killer makes a frantic phone confession to police, only to recant with equal desperation and absolute conviction...An attempt on the life of a strangely reclusive war vet yields questions about his mysterious past--and his very existence...A thirty-year-old crime is retraced step-by-baffling-step after the victim's skeleton is discovered buried in cement...A divine vision leads to religious epiphany, the discovery of a corpse in a trunk, and a miraculous day of judgment...The discovery of a young actor found hanging from a makeshift scaffold suggests a prank gone wrong until a quote from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night offers the true and tantalizing solution.