November, 2038. Scotland has been reunified and Edinburgh's thirty-year experiment with supposedly benevolent totalitarianism is over. But there's still plenty of work for ex-investigator Quint Dalrymple, who's looking into an attempted strangling in Leith. A young man has been attacked by an assailant wearing a bizarre tree-fish costume.

Before Quint can make headway, he is asked by the head of government to look into the strange disappearance of the Lord of the Isles. How could Angus Macdonald, leader of the opposition, have vanished from inside his locked bedroom while his valet was sitting outside? And why has a severed finger been hidden in the room? When a body is discovered, arranged in a disturbingly macabre pose, it becomes clear the two cases are linked. As Quint delves further, he is drawn into a complex web of deception whose threads lead far back into his past ...