Not for a good while yet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is no Clootie Well in Auchterarder. However, the one on the Black Isle is worth a visit, if you like your tourist attractions on the skin-crawling side.

There is also no Ram’s Head in Coldstream, though a decent steak pie can be had at the Besom public house.

My thanks to Dave Henderson for the extended loan of his photographic archive, and to Jonathan Emmans for the introduction.

Rebus’s joke about Basque separatists is “borrowed” (with permission) from Peter Ross of the Sunday Herald newspaper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Rankin is a #1 international best-selling author. Winner of an Edgar Award and the recipient of a Gold Dagger for fiction and the Chandler-Fulbright Award, he lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons.

Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into twenty-two languages and are bestsellers on several continents.

Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, as well as receiving two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews and Edinburgh.

A contributor to BBC2's 'Newsnight Review', he also presented his own TV series, 'Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts', on Channel 4 in 2002. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.