McCormack has returned to Glasgow after a stint with the Metropolitan Police in London. The reason for his return is left a lurking mystery throughout. He is investigating a series of murders that seem at first to be the result of random bouts of violence among Glasgow's poor and destitute. McCormack, however, has insight into Glasgow's underground that many of his colleagues don't. He has a secret of his own that he guards carefully but that takes him places and introduces him to people that prove essential to his investigations. 

History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art looted from other countries, kept even now. Will Chen plans to steal them back. 

When fifteen-year-old Oscar Dreyer-Hoff disappears in this “masterpiece of Nordic noir” (Booklist, starred review), the police assume he’s simply a runaway—a typically overlooked middle child doing what teenagers do all around the world. But his frantic family is certain that something terrible has happened. After all, what runaway would leave behind a note that reads:

It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades, yet it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer whose name alone is enough to make them tremble with fear. The Quaker has killed another victim, snatching a young woman from a nightclub and dumping her body like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement. He leaves no clues, and the investigation has led police down one blind alley after another.

In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveler who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the West Coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a best-selling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording.