Glasgow, 2010: a 10-year old girl chained to a ladder on a riverbank and left to drown; a drug dealer burnt to death while his paedophile Known Associate walks from jail on a technicality. The beginning of a bad week for DI Colin Anderson. Meanwhile, DS Costello, recovering from near-fatal injuries sustained on her last assignment, attends the funeral of a retired DC who killed himself after the publication of a book about a child abduction triggered gang warfare 17 years ago. Howlett, an ageing veteran of the city's organised crime squads, dispatches Costello to a venerable public school, high up in the mountains and then assigns Anderson a clandestine brief to connect the two murders to the activities of Russian mafiosi, men whose tattoos of crows and eagles delineate their murderous hierarchical progress. Howlett manipulates his two officers into linking decades' worth of corruption and Ramsay is now four books into a series that excels in sense of place, realism, plotting and caustic humour. Bleak, black and brilliant.