SUMMARY: Every Thursday for 25 years, Skinner and his friends have met for a game of football. Which is why the discovery of Alec Smith's mutilated corpse has hit Skinner so hard. A former policeman, Smith was one of the Thursday Legends. When another teammate is murdered, Skinner realizes it's only the beginning.

Evil stalks the city of Edinburgh. This time the threat is bigger than the crooks, scam-artists or drug dealers who find their prey in the shadows of the streets. Some people are looking for a big-time hit. The body of a respectable businessman is found hanging from a tree; a veteran from a Belgian marching band is killed in a hit-and-run incident and another dies of an apparent heart attack. Excitement on the streets of Edinburgh is feverish as the city prepares for a huge rally to celebrate the return of Pope John the 25th to his home town. The security has to be bulletproof. But there is a chink in the armour. Does DCC Bob Skinner have the inner strength to find the answer to the biggest question of all?

In the fifth novel in the Bob Skinner Mystery series, a mid-air explosion sends a plane plunging to disaster from the Scottish skies, the British and American Defense Secretaries among the victims. Out of the blue, Edinburgh's Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner finds himself leading the biggest investigation of his career. The means of destruction is apparent from the start, but the investigation quickly grows more puzzling—for once they have an embarrassment of suspects with motive and opportunity. Then sudden random violence wrenches Skinner himself out of the picture. While his colleagues struggle with the mass of clues, he lies on the brink of death, trapped with the horrors from his own hidden past. As Skinner's ordeal reaches its crescendo, the police pursue their suspects one by one, until at last they are brought to a dramatic, thrilling, but tragic conclusion.About the AuthorQuintin Jardine is the author of the Bob Skinner Mysteries, the Oz Blackstone series, and the Primavera Blackstone series.

Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner could be forgiven for thinking not only that someone up there doesn't like him, but that someone down here is out to get him. Suffering the strain of a marriage on the rocks, the last thing he needs is for his private life to be plastered across the front pages of a sleazy tabloid. To make matters worse, two brutal murders and new allegations about Skinner himself make simultaneous headlines. As time ticks away, Skinner faces the greatest, and most personal, tests of his career. Unless he can clear his name and uncover the secret behind the series of brutal crimes, he stands to lose everything: his family, his career and even his life and liberty.

Primavera Blackstone becomes the prime suspect in the second breathtaking novel in a brilliant new series by bestselling Scottish crime writer Quintin Jardine. Primavera is enjoying the quiet life in an idyllic village on the Catalan coast of Spain. The attractive single mother and eight-year-old Tom, son of the late and still lamented Oz Blackstone, are popular figures in the tiny community. But her close friendship with the parish priest has eyebrows rising and tongues wagging. Then a dispute explodes with a powerful councillor who refuses to allow the village wine fair to go ahead. When his body is found, head caved in, some ominous questions are asked...

Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner has a failed marriage on his hands, and a death on his conscience. In Edinburgh, Skinner's daughter is being harassed by a stalker. Can he protect her? A bookmaker has taken one gamble too many and paid his debt in a gruesome fashion. Is it an underworld vendetta, or something more sinister? Alongside it all a casual call to the Chief Constable sets him on a personal crusade which quickly points to a bigamist at work. Or is it worse? Four crimes, four crises: can Skinner and his people solve them? Indeed, can they survive them?

The brilliant new Bob Skinner mystery by the master of crime fiction, his most ambitious ever. After a tip-off, a man's body is exhumed from a shallow grave in Edinburgh. Murder surely, yet he died from natural causes, so, case closed? Indeed was there ever a case? But Chief Constable Skinner and his people keep on digging. Who was the man, why was he buried so reverentially, and by whom? Meanwhile corruption is discovered within the force, and an investigation launched. Immersed in crises, his marriage heading for the rocks, Skinner finds his very career hanging in the balance, its fate beyond his control. In a tale seen through the eyes of each of its leading players, Quintin Jardine, the Crimemaster, lays mystery upon mystery until the greatest threat of all those facing the Chief is revealed, and a deadly race begins. Can he win out, or will his life implode?

Newly married to his childhood sweetheart and happily settled in Glasgow, private enquiry agent Oz Blackstone is looking for a touch of the unexpected in his life. And when he's introduced to the seven-foot, granite-muscled figure of Everett Davis, champion wrestler and head of the burgeoning Global Wrestling Alliance, he knows he's found it. The GWA's televised tour of Europe has been dogged by inexplicable technical hitches and terrifying accidents in the ring - leaving Everett convinced that someone is trying to sabotage his business before it can take on the big boys and go global. Under the inspired disguise of Master of Ceremonies, Oz enters the extraordinary world of professional wrestling to try and unmask the perpetrator. But as he begins to discover the dangerous reality behind the glittering facade, a string of accidents becomes murder, and suddenly Oz has to wrestle with the biggest crisis of his life.