When the privileged daughter of a merchant banker disappears, a search through her e-mails uncovers her secret life-and a bizarre correspondence with an on-line game player who delights in macabre puzzles. The first game was for the girl. The next one is for Inspector John Rebus, a man haunted by the impenetrable riddles of his own troubled past. But the lead is soon complicated by an unexpected twist. A hand-carved wooden doll in an eight-inch coffin is found on the grounds of the victim`s home-a clue that links her vanishing to the deaths of four other women, and to a centuries-old offense that still scars the grisly history of Edinburgh. From the shadowy world of an Internet stalker to the quicksand of lies in the missing girl`s dissolute family, Rebus is led into the soul of evil. And to a shattering crime that only he, a man who treads the fine line between investigative brilliance and personal oblivion, could ever hope to understand.