[3] In a Prologue, Rebus moves down two flights of stairs to the ground-floor flat in the same Arden Street tenement, with a lot of help from Siobhan Clarke.

In trying to discover why he was murdered, he gets to know his granddaughter’s father for the first time; Keith had been obsessed with the history of a nearby World War II prison camp, some of whose survivors settled locally and are still alive.

In Edinburgh, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox are part of the Murder Inquiry Team looking into the mysterious killing of a Saudi student.

The dead man’s closest friend was a young Scottish aristocrat whose family trust owns most of the area around Tongue, so Rebus’s investigations overlap with Siobhan’s.

Stuart Kelly, in The Scotsman, commented: “But piecing [the solutions] together balances readerly patience with the impetus of the plot” and “ There is a general feeling that everything is going to hell in a handcart” without any bright notes except Rebus’s sheer ability to survive.