Charles Paris returns again, in a fringe show at the Edinburgh Festival, with another nubile girl to provoke him, and his accommodating wife to console him, and a gory murder to challenge him in So Much Blood.

Edinburgh and the Festival are both background and foreground with Charles, flitting between a re-visualized Midsummer Night's Dream, a mixed-media satire, a late-night revue, and his own one-man show on Thomas Hood-and with a fading pop star as the first victim, a bomb scare in Holyrood Palace, and a suicide leap from the top of the Rock. Charles copes splendidly with the Festival, with his affair with the girl with the navy eyes, and with a most complex murder investigation.

Genre: Mystery