SILENT BONES

The bones in question actually speak volumes, especially to DCI Karen Pirie, who does her very best to amplify their plea for justice.

Convinced that the original investigation five years ago got it all wrong, New Zealander Drew Jamieson wants Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit to look more closely into the death of his brother, hotel manager Tom Jamieson, whose fatal tumble down Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps was ruled an accident. Using a computer image search, Drew claims to have identified Tom’s killer as dodgy surgical instruments manufacturer Marcus Nicol. At the same time, a mudslide beneath the M73 motorway reveals the skeleton of freelance investigative journalist Sam Nimmo, who vanished more than 10 years ago after the death of Rachel Morrison, his pregnant fiancée. Assumed then to be her killer, Nimmo’s now revealed as another victim. The two cases couldn’t possibly have any connection—until an examination of Nimmo’s research just before his death reveals that he was working on an accusation of bribery at soccer games by professional gamblers and the rape of an anonymous guest shortly after a high-class party thrown by Lord Haig Striven-Douglass in support of Scottish independence. It turns out that Justified Sinners, the secretive monthly men’s book club Nimmo had joined months before his death, had lost two of its members, including Tom Jamieson, to untimely deaths. Calling on experts of every stripe to help identify and pursue new leads, Karen and her team labor to connect the dots as she waits anxiously to hear whether Rafiq, the Syrian refugee physician she’s come to love, can get a Canadian passport to travel to Scotland.

None of these plot lines turns out well for the characters. But readers will be rewarded by a richly textured experience.