When police bust a local brothel, they find Gregor Jack, a millionaire entrepreneur and self-styled antipoverty activist. Later, Jack's wife turns up dead-- murdered in a manner similar to that of a working-class woman in Edinburgh. Did both women fall prey to a serial killer? Or was Mrs. Jack's murder a copy-cat killing?

Sammy McNally walks into the prestigious investment firm Hammill Ferguson and abruptly blows out his brains with a sawed-off shotgun, directly in front of the firm's founder. Rebus's subsequent investigation leads him to some of Edinburgh's wealthiest and most influential citizens and puts him at odds not only with his boss, DSC Gill Templer, but also with his partner, DS Siobhan Clarke.

I walked with a zombie: A young Canadian nurse comes to the West Indies to care for the wife of a plantation manager, who suffers from a strange catatonic condition, and learns about local voodoo practices in her search for a cure. Robert Louis Stevenson's The body snatcher: A surgeon and teacher of anatomy needs fresh cadavers for classroom demonstrations and pays a sinister cabman to supply them. When the cemeteries become more closely guarded,...