When Joe Christie's fishing boat is swept onto Tentsmuir beach during a fierce storm, a man's mutilated body is found in the hold. DCI Andy Gilchrist of St Andrews CID is called in to investigate. But his murder investigation deepens when he learns that Joe Christie and his boat have been missing for three years.


The police pathologist retrieves a five pound note from the dead man's throat. Is this the killer's calling card? The dead man is found to have been on the payroll of big Jock Shepherd, Scotland's premier crime patriarch, and when three more of Shepherd's men turn up brutally murdered, Gilchrist fears a tectonic shift in the criminal underworld - and come face to face with a man for whom human life means nothing.


Praise for T F Muir


'Muir knows what he's about . . . A truly gripping read, with all the makings of a classic series' Mick Herron


'Rebus did it for Edinburgh. Laidlaw did it for Glasgow. Gilchrist might just be the bloke to put St Andrews on the crime fiction map' Daily Record


'Gripping and grisly, with plenty of twists and turns that race along with black humour' Craig Robertson