It is summer it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident - a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie ex-army ex-police ex-private detective is also an innocent bystander - until he becomes a murder suspect. As the body count mounts each member of the teeming Dickensian casts story contains a kernel of the next like a set of nesting Russian dolls. They are all looking for love or money or redemption or escape: but what each actually discovers is their own true self.