The Edinburgh Detective

He has seen every kind of criminal Edinburgh can produce. Thieves, murderers, liars wearing respectable faces. After decades in the shadows of the city's worst secrets, Detective M'Govan thinks nothing can surprise him anymore.

He is wrong.

When a despised miser turns up dead in a country cottage, his throat cut with his own knife and his prized Chinese chessmen vanished, M'Govan walks into a case where everyone is hiding something and the truth keeps changing shape. A beloved Bailie with shaking hands. A poacher with nine lives and a missing finger. A dead man's Bible stuffed with witchcraft and written accusations from beyond the grave.

The closer M'Govan gets, the more the evidence refuses to behave. Witnesses tell contradictory truths. Suspects confess to crimes they did not commit. The respectable and the wretched trade places without warning.

M'Govan trusts his instincts absolutely — they have never failed him. But this case does not reward instinct. It rewards patience. And patience has never been his strongest quality.

With each investigation, he confronts a city that hides its darkest impulses behind locked doors and good names. A mother's ferocious love for a ragged child. A dying woman's impossible secret. A confession nobody wants to hear.

Can M'Govan keep pulling back the curtain on Edinburgh's hidden world before the city's darkness finally pulls him under?