On a frosty winter's morning, DI John Rebus and a select group of colleagues are in the company of an expert archaeologist on a tour of Queensbury House – an ex-hospital about to house Her Majesty's parliament in Scotland - when they stumble across a mummified body secreted behind a wall. Later that same day, a tramp jumps off the North Bridge though the glass roof of Waverly Station, a not unusual occurrence except that 'Supertramp' had in his possession a building society passbook with a balance of over £400,000 in it. The two cases seem unconnected until a third death - of a high-profile prospective Member of the Scottish Parliament - is discovered in Queensbury House's disused summer-house. As Rebus and his hand-picked crew dig up secrets twenty years buried, it begins to look as if Scotland's second attempt at devolution though more successful will be just as dirty... This eleventh Rebus novel is vintage Rankin - dark, blackly funny and brilliantly convoluted - and brings back to Edinburgh the ghost of a Mr Big who has the power to destabilise a state.
Description:
On a frosty winter's morning, DI John Rebus and a select group of colleagues are in the company of an expert archaeologist on a tour of Queensbury House – an ex-hospital about to house Her Majesty's parliament in Scotland - when they stumble across a mummified body secreted behind a wall. Later that same day, a tramp jumps off the North Bridge though the glass roof of Waverly Station, a not unusual occurrence except that 'Supertramp' had in his possession a building society passbook with a balance of over £400,000 in it. The two cases seem unconnected until a third death - of a high-profile prospective Member of the Scottish Parliament - is discovered in Queensbury House's disused summer-house. As Rebus and his hand-picked crew dig up secrets twenty years buried, it begins to look as if Scotland's second attempt at devolution though more successful will be just as dirty... This eleventh Rebus novel is vintage Rankin - dark, blackly funny and brilliantly convoluted - and brings back to Edinburgh the ghost of a Mr Big who has the power to destabilise a state.