Quite Ugly One Morning: This is story of murder, corruption and sin

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

It begins, as many stories do, with a body. This one belongs to a member of a respected Edinburgh medical family, found in circumstances that are difficult to explain and harder to ignore. The scene is disturbing, the details unsettling, and the questions refuse to settle.

Jack Parlabane is a journalist more accustomed to scepticism than reverence, and he is not inclined to look away. As he follows the trail, he moves through a city where reputation carries weight and corruption is carefully disguised. The case draws him into places where respectability thins and moral certainty is a liability.

This is crime fiction with a sharp eye for power and pretence, attentive to the uneasy overlap between public virtue and private vice. Set against an Edinburgh that is both familiar and faintly grotesque, it introduces a protagonist shaped as much by curiosity as by refusal to accept what he is told.