Lou Perlman, officially on sick leave from the Strathclyde Police, has hit the lowest point in his life. Barred from participating in the investigation of the bloody gangland slayings that have shocked Glasgow, and seemingly abandoned by Miriam, the nomadic object of his affection, he's a man without much of a future...Until the day when he decides to clean his long-neglected house and discovers, stuffed between yellowing old newspapers, a decayed human hand in a Ziploc bag...Whose hand is this? And who cut if off? And who put it in Perlman's bedroom? These are questions he alone must answer, and they take him on a baffling quest through the strata of Glasgow society, from slum tenements to casinos to New Age Temples and high-flying criminals and freaks... the answers, when they come, prove to be more troubling than the questions.