No Live Case

Some truths have nowhere to go.

In 1987 a Fraserburgh man was convicted of murdering his wife. Her body was never found. He served his sentence, wrote to his son every birthday, and died in 2024 still saying he had not done it. His son never opened a single letter.

Detective Inspector Morven Tait now runs the Legacy Unit at Gartcosh, a small room that reads what a search across eight old Scottish police forces' records turns up. Seven weeks after Fraserburgh buries its most respected retired skipper, the search pairs that old conviction with two young women who vanished from fishing ports on the west coast, years apart. Each was last seen near a man in a fisherman's gansey with the same pattern knitted on the yoke.

The convicted man is dead. Whoever else might be responsible may be beyond the reach of any court. There is nobody to put on trial and nobody to set free.

What is left are the living: a son who is the only person in law who can ask for his father's case to be looked at again, a daughter with a memory she has never spoken aloud, a family who have gone to the same harbour every August for forty years, and the unit's analyst, Jo Farquhar, who grew up in Fraserburgh and is about to find out how close to home a file can come.

No Live Case is the fifth Legacy Unit novel: a Scottish police procedural about what an institution owes the dead, and the people who have to carry what it finds.