Fleshmarket Close

An illegal immigrant is found murdered in an Edinburgh housing scheme: a racist attack, or something else entirely?

Rebus is drawn into the case, even though his old police station has closed for business, and his masters would rather he retire than stick around. But Rebus is that most stubborn of creatures. As he investigates, he must visit an asylum-seekers’ detention centre, deal with the sleazy Edinburgh underworld, and maybe even fall in love…

Siobhan, meanwhile, has problems of her own – as the trail of a missing teenager takes her closer than is healthy towards the web of a convicted rapist. Then there’s the small matter of the two skeletons – a woman and an infant – found buried beneath a concrete cellar floor in Fleshmarket Close.

The scene begins to look like an elaborate stunt – but whose, and for what purpose? And how can it tie to the murder on the unforgiving housing-scheme known as Knoxland?

Fleshmarket Close explores what it means to a society when shared heritage is lost beneath uglier aspects of our nature: greed, mistrust, violence and exploitation. It is a true state of the nation novel, and one of Rebus’s most personal cases yet.