Ex-cop Quint Dalrymple discovers there is something very rotten in the independent city-state of Edinburgh in this near-future dystopian thriller.Edinburgh, spring 2034. The weather's balmy, there's a referendum on whether to join a reconstituted Scotland coming up – and a tourist is found strangled. As usual, maverick detective Quint Dalrymple is called in to do the Council of City Guardians' dirty work.For the first time in his career, Quint is stumped by the complexity of the case. An explosion at the City Zoo is followed by the discovery of another body – and the prime suspect is nowhere to be found. Can Quint and his sidekick, Guard commander Davie, put a stop to the killings before the city erupts into open violence? Are the leaders of other Scottish states planning to take over Edinburgh, or is the source of unrest much closer to home? Quint must race to pull the threads together before he becomes one of the numerous skeletons on display ...

Writer's block is nothing compared to the sinister assignment London-based novelist Matt Wells has just received.A chain of seemingly innocent e-mails from a devoted fan turns deadly when Matt discovers the correspondent is a cold-blooded killer with an agenda for murder--and his family and friends are among the scheduled victims. Under close surveillance, Matt is plunged into a plot more twisted than any he has used in his novels.This is the real thing, and with each killing, the man known as the White Devil tightens his grip by incriminating Matt at the murder scenes. Cast not only as the ghostwriter of his persecutor's terrifying story, but as the victim, Matt needs to risk everything to protect his loved ones.But with the police closing in and his friends being picked off, he is running out of time. The White Devil is out there--and he's watching.From BooklistMatt Wells, once a best-selling novelist, is suffering from such a bad case of writer's block that he seizes on the smallest opportunity, such as checking his Web site for e-mails from fans, to convince himself he is still a writer. But when the e-mails from one of his most loyal readers suddenly turn threatening, Matt is plunged into a nightmare so bewildering that it could have come from the pages of the kind of novel he used to write. Why is the man who calls himself the White Devil committing gruesome crimes, and why is he leaving evidence at the scenes that links Matt to those crimes? Johnston tells a story that, though a good bit darker, will remind readers of James Grippando or even Donald Westlake in his serious mode (think The Hook). Very gripping, very frightening stuff. David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reservedReview"'The plotting is paranoid, the action is authentic, the characters are convincing, and the denouement is devastating.' Quintin Jardine 'The Death List is white-knuckle stuff...' Mark Billingham 'A thrilling, blackly funny read.' John Connolly"

Things are not ducky in Edinburgh in 2025. Indeed, they've been far from ducky since the financial collapse of 2002, the crippling global warming, the UK's devolution into so many anarchic city-states, and Edinburgh's embrace of the Enlightenment (the ironic name of their dystopian state, controlled by the Council of City Guardians) and its de facto absence of individual liberty.On the bright side, crime's down, tourism's up, and the Edlott lottery (a "citizen's" only shot at betterment) is doing land-office business. A pity, then, that recent winner Fordyce Kennedy's gone missing and Frankie Thomson, a demoted Auxiliary Guardsman, has turned up dead on the banks of the Water of Leith. Ironically, Frankie died of nicotine poisoning after sampling a contraband bottle of "Ultimate Usquebaugh." Usquebaugh is Gaelic for "the water of life," or whisky.Enter Quintilian Dalrymple, Water of Death's noirish, blues-haunted hero, a freelance detective (himself a demotee from the powerful Auxiliary Guard thanks to exploits detailed in 1999's award-winning Body Politic and 2000's The Bone Yard) who's reluctantly tapped by the Guardians when things get deadly. With the help of his Guardsman sidekick, Davie, and the sufferance of a by-the-book superior, Quint is tasked with finding Fordyce, finding Frankie's murderer, and finally, finding Fordyce's murderer after he, too, succumbs to Ultimate Usquebaugh. In the meantime, Quint juggles the professional-intimate relationship he's having with the city's Senior Guardian, Sophia, the reemergence of his ex-lover, Katharine, and the fact that Katharine, Sophia, and countless others are possible committers of the mounting crimes.Intelligent, breezy, and surely paced, Paul Johnston's wryly humorous mystery succeeds despite its basic whodunit plot. Clever dialogue and likeable (if not wholly fleshed) characters abound, and the near-future setting provides enough diversion and sociopolitical food-for-thought to nicely carry the day. -- Michael Hudson

The Bone Yard is a dystopian thriller set in Edinburgh during the harsh winter of 2021. Rogue detective Quintilian Dalrymple, a former bureaucrat who left his high-ranking job to work for the parks service and solve mysteries on the side, sets about catching a serial killer with a peculiar signature. The killer bites out the victim's throat, cuts out the tongue, removes the genitals, and leaves in the cavity a cassette of the electric blues of Clapton, Hendrix, and others. In the allegedly crime-free Edinburgh city-state (which is expressly modeled on Plato's Republic, but in practice resembles every cliché of pre-1990 Eastern Bloc regimes), blues music is contraband. So are casual sex, monogamy, fattening foods, all drugs, and more-than-weekly showers. So why does the killer leave cryptic messages via electric blues?Johnston won Britain's John Creasey Award for best first crime novel with 1999's Body Politic, and in The Bone Yard he possibly takes for granted that his readers already know and care about Dalrymple and his cohorts. Character development is scanty, so the playful rivalry between Dalrymple and sidekick Davie, for example, is mostly conveyed through edginess and four-letter words. Their terseness is juxtaposed against the obfuscatory language of the council, the "iron Boy Scouts" who gradually become implicated in the four grisly murders and a related scheme. The serial murderer's infelicitous musical clues lead Dalrymple to discover a dangerous drug remarkably like Viagra, which is being manufactured illegally within the Edinburgh city-state. Dalrymple travels to a zoo, a slaughterhouse, and a foul fishing boat to find the lab, which may be tied to the mysterious "Bone Yard" that the council shrouds in top-level security and secrecy. In addition, a nubile exotic dancer meets an untimely end, leading the two detectives and Dalrymple's tough ex-girlfriend Katharine to the Three Graces sex club, which caters to Edinburgh's rich and burgeoning tourist population. Readers trolling for mysteries set in exciting locales may thus be gratified by The Bone Yard, which is a blend of 1984 (though with inferior prose), The China Syndrome, and Showgirls. The plot moves briskly through dark terrain, both physically and philosophically. It's got a relentlessly downbeat tenor, but Johnston intricately ties together the threads of the four murder victims and their psychopathic killer, and the secret of the Bone Yard. --Kathi Inman Berens

Quint Dalrymple investigates the strange disappearance of the Lord of the Isles in this gripping dystopian thriller. November, 2038. Scotland has been reunified and Edinburgh's thirty-year experiment with supposedly benevolent totalitarianism is over. But there's still plenty of work for ex-investigator Quint Dalrymple, who's looking into an attempted strangling in Leith. A young man has been attacked by an assailant wearing a bizarre tree-fish costume. Before Quint can make headway, he is asked by the head of government to look into the strange disappearance of the Lord of the Isles. How could Angus Macdonald, leader of the opposition, have vanished from inside his locked bedroom while his valet was sitting outside? And why has a severed finger been hidden in the room? When a body is discovered, arranged in a disturbingly macabre pose, it becomes clear the two cases are linked. As Quint delves further, he is drawn into a complex web of deception whose threads...

April, 2028, and independent Edinburgh is facing a mounting crime wave. Experts from the utopian university-state of New Oxford recommend an extreme deterrent – a maximum security prison alongside the central tourist zone. At the prison opening ceremony, the unthinkable happens – an Edinburgh guardian is shot. Having linked New Oxford to the assassination, maverick investigator Quintilian Dalrymple travels there to close the case. Once there, he discovers evidence of a ruthless conspiracy extending to his home city and the only way to stop it is to penetrate New Oxford’s mysterious heart – the place known only as the House of Dust.From Publishers WeeklyIn the Edinburgh, Scotland, of the near future, crime supposedly doesn't exist. But no utopia stays perfect for long, and in Johnston's fifth and final crime novel featuring the grizzled Quint Dalrymple (Water of Death, etc.), the city's leaders are contemplating high-security prisons to house society's troublemakers. Dalrymple, the narrator, is a private investigator in a police state that doesn't welcome him, a blues aficionado in a world that has outlawed music. Caught in a vicious game between the guardians of Edinburgh and the prison consultants of New Oxford, Dalrymple is bullied into service when a guard is shot and a high-ranking official threatened. Johnston makes the well-worn idea of crime in a crime-free world fascinating by wrapping it inside layers of political intrigue and subterfuge. Indeed, this is as much a commentary on modern-day England as it is a stylish mystery. Plot elements like insidious youth gangs, cybernetic implants, stealth assassins and a severed arm in a politician's bathtub at times take a backseat to Johnston's convoluted political preaching, but never for long. While this novel can stand alone, readers familiar with the previous volumes will derive the most enjoyment from Johnston's richly textured brave new world.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review“Hugely entertaining… engagingly imagined.” -- The Times “Intelligent, thought–provoking… an excellent series.” -- Booklist “This series is getting better all the time.” -- Val McDermid “Thrilling, accomplished.” -- Ian Rankin, The Sunday Times

Independent Edinburgh, 2026. The birth-rate is down in the Council’s ‘perfect city’ and gangs of disaffected kids roam the streets. A break-in at the former Scottish Parliament archive is rapidly followed by two gruesome murders, the victims mutilated and covered in blood-drenched branches. Renegade investigator Quintilian Dalrymple’s subsequent enquiries take a new twist when Edinburgh’s brightest teenagers are abducted to the much-feared democratic city-state of Glasgow. What Quint finds there will change his life forever …I

Alex Mavros enters a chilling world of power and corruption when he investigates the kidnapping of a wealthy Greek ship-ownerWealthy ship-owner Kostas Gatsos has been missing for several weeks, having been snatched from his luxury villa on the idyllic island of Lesvos. Curiously, there has been no ransom demand. When the police investigation stalls, the desperate Gatsos family turn to private investigator Alex Mavros for help.Inherently suspicious of the super-rich and initially reluctant to take on the case, Mavros finds himself dealing with a highly dysfunctional family with more than a few skeletons in its closet, a family whose tentacles have a surprisingly wide reach. Alex believes the key to the mystery lies in the ship-owner's shady past and sinister business deals – but the truth behind the kidnapping is more disturbing, and closer to home, than Mavros could ever have imagined.

April, 2028, and independent Edinburgh is facing a mounting crime wave. Experts from the utopian university-state of New Oxford recommend an extreme deterrent – a maximum security prison alongside the central tourist zone. At the prison opening ceremony, the unthinkable happens – an Edinburgh guardian is shot. Having linked New Oxford to the assassination, maverick investigator Quintilian Dalrymple travels there to close the case. Once there, he discovers evidence of a ruthless conspiracy extending to his home city and the only way to stop it is to penetrate New Oxford’s mysterious heart – the place known only as the House of Dust.