A Good Hanging and Other Stories

A killer makes a frantic phone confession to police, only to recant with equal desperation--and absolute conviction...An attempt on the life of a strangely reclusive war vet yields questions about his mysterious past--and his very existence...A thirty-year-old crime is retraced step-by-baffling-step after the victim's skeleton is discovered buried in cement...A divine vision leads to religious epiphany, the discovery of a corpse in a trunk, and a miraculous day of judgment...The discovery of a young actor found hanging from a makeshift scaffold suggests a prank gone wrong--until a quote from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night offers the true and tantalizing solution.

From the neglected grounds of a crumbling mansion to the damp recesses of a tenement slum to the idyllic serenity of a public park, crimes flourish. Only Ian Rankin could conceive of them. Only Inspector Rebus can solve them.