Not the dreamily romantic image we see on shortbread tins, but a harshly realistic picture of old Edinburgh where chamber pots are emptied out of windows, and taverns are dark drinking dens. What a pleasure it was, therefore, to start reading Stuart Laing’s ‘A Pound Of Flesh’ and find ‘Auld Reekie’ recreated just as I would have imagined it. The noise, the bustle, the smells of seventy thousand people, high and low born, all living cheek by jowl in Scotland’s ancient capital. I’ve spent many an evening wandering the closes and wynds of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, trying to imagine what it would have been like in days gone by. His investigation leads from the elegant drawing rooms of Edinburgh's high society to the city's most infamous brothel and into the grim hovels of the lowest alehouses on the Cowgate.īut as more bodies are discovered Robert Young is forced to confront the possibility that his client may actually be guilty! He is a young man who has earned a reputation amongst the city's legal fraternity for being the one person who can root out the truth by venturing into the capital's criminal underbelly. In desperation his lawyer turns to the one man in Edinburgh who can save him from the hangman's noose.

A bankrupt young nobleman with an addiction to the twin vices of gambling and loose women stands accused of the horrific double murder and all the evidence seems to point towards his guilt. Deep beneath the rain soaked and wind scoured streets of the city a foul crime committed in the dark of night leaves two men lying dead in a dank cellar.

A Pound of Flesh by Stuart S. Laing