Midnight in Glasgow is not the best time to be faced with a dead body. Particularly if the body in question is your ex-lover and the woman grieving at her bedside used to be your friend. Add a corpse packed with Temazepam, a genetic engineer with an unstable past and a killer on the loose with a knife and you have all the reason you need to walk away and never come back. Glasgow therapist Dr Kellen Stewart has put the past behind her: medical career, relationship, life on the farm in the country. Thenthe phone rings and Bridget is dead the only lover who ever counted.The local doctor says it's a heart attack, the police think it's suicide. Kellen knows that it's neither but is she willing to rake up the past to prove it? Dragged into a world of rogue doctors, bent genetic engineers and killers who gut their victims as a warning, Kellen must face her own past as much as the very real terrors of the present to stop the killing or she'll be next.

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction

Dr Kellen Stewart knows medicine can be used for good, but it can also be used to do great harm, that's why she left the profession.

When her ex-lover dies of a heart attack and shortly after she finds out that her brother, also a medic, died a few weeks before in exactly the same way, Kellen is convinced that they have both been murdered - after all heart attacks don't come in pairs.

As Kellen tries to find out who could have killed them she is drawn into a morass of vanishing corpses, drug barons and biomedical secrets - and danger. She desperately needs some answers - but they appear to be as scarce as hen's teeth.

'Scott writes with a forensic precision and attention to detail that never gets in the way of the story's momentum...it becomes, like the best crime novels, a brilliant puzzle you itch to solve before anyone else' Daily Mail

'A splendid debut...cleverly developed' Sunday Telegraph

9780552168731
£6.99
www.mcscott.co.ukebook available