Dimensions
153 x 234 x 35mm
A student has gone missing in Edinburgh - completely out of character. She's not just any student, though, but the daughter of extremely well-to-do and influential bankers. There's almost nothing to go on until Detective Inspector John Rebus gets an unmistakable gut feeling that there's more to this than just another runaway spaced out on unaccustomed freedom or worse.
Two leads emerge: a carved wooden doll in a toy coffin, found in the student's home village, and an Internet role-playing game. The ancient and the modern, brought together by uncomfortable circumstance and a curmudgeonly detective happier with long playing records than MP3 digital technology . . .
Putting together a team of seeming misfits, Rebus takes the unpromising material and runs with it, leaving DC Siobhan Clarke to take her chances with the virtual Quizmaster. She's young enough to know how to navigate the net, but is she old enough and wise enough to spot the pitfalls of this case?
Meanwhile, Rebus has taken his eye off the ball, intrigued as to how the case is linked with sixteen coffins found on an Edinburgh hillside in 1836 . .
In this powerful novel, Rankin brings past, present and future together in a terrifying duel of good and evil.
