Set during the Edinburgh Festival, this novel starts with a brutally executed corpse being discovered in Mary King's Close, an ancient subterranean street.

The body has a tattoo of "SaS", later found to refer to 'Sword and Shield', a long-thought-defunct Scottish Nationalist group with links to sectarianism in Northern Ireland.

The victim turns out to be the son of notorious gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty, and the plot moves towards the unthinkable prospect of a terrorist atrocity in a tourist-filled Edinburgh.

The political background of the plot depicts an alliance between Scottish nationalist fringe groups and loyalist paramilitaries who believe they're being 'sold out' in the peace deal with the IRA.

According to Ian Rankin, the punch line is as follows: "For Hans that does dishes can be as soft as Gervase with mild, green, hairy-lipped squid.