A question of blood

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

Two teenagers have been shot dead in a Scottish school by a former army soldier who then turned the gun on himself. Rebus is assigned to investigate the killer's background — and discovers that he had connections to Rebus that neither of them ever acknowledged. Meanwhile, Rebus has burns on his hands from a fire of unexplained origin, and the official version of what happened doesn't entirely hold. Ian Rankin's fourteenth Rebus novel is his most morally uncomfortable: a mass shooting in a school, a killer with whom Rebus has uncomfortable sympathy, and a series of questions about whether the army made the man or the man made himself.