A junkie lies dead in an Edinburgh squat and he's just another dead addict. Nobody but Detective Inspector John Rebus, prowling the streets of the city in search of somthing so evil he can almost taste it, confronting the darkness within himself as well as without, gives a damn. Rebus digs deeper into the death which looks more and more like murder. There is something savage and seductive at large in Edinburgh, something from which there is nowhere to hide.