The Leading Light

The last case.

Walter Noble, seventy-nine, retired lighthouse service, spent his last years as a volunteer archivist, cataloguing a century and a half of keepers' logs so that the town could finally read its own weather. He is found at the foot of the tower stair on a September morning, with his reading glasses folded neatly in his breast pocket.

A man on a dark stair does not put his reading eyes away unless he is leaving. And a man does not leave alone if somebody has walked down behind him.

Detective Inspector Cormac Buchan has three months of service left and a wife who has laid down one condition for the case he retires on. What he finds at Kinnaird Head is a single missing page from the summer of 1975, and the enormous, generous, beloved life that has been built on top of it.

The sixth and final DI Cormac Buchan Investigation: a Scottish murder mystery about civic virtue, the long arithmetic of one bad hour, and a detective's last quiet turn at a door.