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Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. Twenty years later, Kerry’s life is unrecognisable. She’s a prize-winning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books..

All is quiet in Kurrjakk when Jamie gets a call from an old friend. A family has seemingly vanished in the mountains near the border to the north, and the local polis have turned up nothing. When Jamie and Thorsen arrive in the quiet border town of Etterange, it doesn't take long for them to realise something isn't right. An inept twenty-six-year-old is running the polis station, there's been a spate of unreported missing persons, and there are rumblings of a strange community living out on the lake, shut off from the rest of the world.

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), The Stranger Times is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable. At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor...well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got problems of her own.

In a French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than 70 years apart. Asked by a colleague to inspect the site of the former, forensics expert Enzo Macleod quickly finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the latter. Two extraordinary narratives are set in train - one historical, unfolding in the treacherous wartime years of occupied France, the other contemporary, set in the autumn of 2020 as France re-enters Covid lockdown.

Two years have passed since the tragic events of The Gleam in the North and Ewen Cameron’s wife, Alison, is awaiting the birth of their third child in Ardroy while Ewen visits his cousin Ian Stewart at his great uncle Alexander’s home at Ivernacree. Ian is now heir to the estate, having lost his older brother, Alan, at Culloden, where they were betrayed by their archenemy, Campbell of Cairns. Ian is under pressure from his father to marry and secure an heir.

Janey Markham is thrilled to be moving with her family to Buckingham Crescent, the smartest address in a desirable suburban town. Worried she’ll be excluded by the glossy local mothers, Janey is thrilled when she meets Tanya, the kind of woman she has always looked up to. Tanya takes Janey under her wing and her teenage daughter, Angel, is amazing with Janey’s little boy. As Janey and Tanya grow closer, Janey feels she can finally leave her troubled past behind.

Dylan Mint has Tourette's. His life is a constant battle to keep the bad stuff in - the swearing, the tics, the howling dog that seems to escape whenever he gets stressed. But a routine visit to the hospital changes everything. Overhearing a hushed conversation between the doctor and his mum, Dylan discovers that he's going to die in March. So he makes a list of things he must do before he dies: First, he wants to have real sex with gorgeous Michelle Malloy; Second, he's got to find his autistic best friend Amir a new best bud; Third, he's got to get his dad back home from the army so they can say goodbye properly.

Oskar's school teacher raises the alarm. Oskar's mother is abroad, and he has been left in the care of friends, but has been arriving in school hungry, unkempt and with bruises on his arms, legs and body. Experienced foster carer Cathy Glass is asked to look after him, but as the weeks pass, her concerns deepen. Oskar is far too quiet for a child of six and is clearly scared of something or someone.

John Carr has recently left the SAS, after a long and distinguished career, and is now working for a Russian oligarch in the murky world of private security. But an incident from his past - in which three terrorists were brutally killed - suddenly comes back to haunt him. Tracked by a hit man out for revenge, John Carr is forced to step over the line to defend himself and his family. It's a cruel and violent world - and one he thought he'd left behind.