"The Romanian knew...The discovery of a body, unexpected, always caused problems." Andrew Parvel, a thirty-something Scot, is found outside his Edinburgh flat with an almost empty whisky bottle in one hand and a collection of prescription drugs in his stomach. A single man who worked in finance and appeared to lead a very dull existence. A clear-cut suicide that ought to have been as disinteresting to the police as his life had been. There is something about the manner of the suicide that Vincent Carmichael, Edinburgh city pathologist, cannot satisfactorily conclude in his own mind. Some unresolved glimmer about the ordinary man's passing draws him and colleague D.S. Don Mackenzie into another side of Edinburgh; a life of academia, immigrants and gothic folklore. Whilst we can only come to the best conclusion we can, based upon the evidence and the breadth of knowledge we have available to us at the time; our conclusions and assumptions can sometimes fall very wide of the mark.