The Man in the Dark

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In fog-bound London, the battered and rootless Sandy Kinloch stumbles toward his old friend Dr. Peter Dunn, carrying the wreckage of a life ruined by war, poverty, and a humiliating rejection by an editor. Their reunion reopens memories of St. Andrews and their lost companion Hugh Abercromby, but the warmth of friendship quickly gives way to shame, pride, and a bitter quarrel over Kinloch's abandoned medical career and desperate turn to writing. Cast back into the night penniless and stranded, Kinloch is driven deeper into the city's shadowy underworld, where a suspicious stranger in a fur-lined coat offers him easy money for a strange, secretive errand. Drawn into the scheme, Kinloch finds himself hidden behind a screen, instructed to cough on cue and rustle papers while an unseen meeting unfolds. Soon the story widens into a darkly ingenious murder mystery, as McNab reconstructs a killing through a blind man's walking-stick, marks on the wall, and the state of the fire, arguing that the blind man was not the murderer but a witness caught in desperate violence. As McNab pursues the trail of a missing blind man and a dead public figure with powerful enemies, his sly, relentless questioning turns the investigation into a tense hunt for hidden knowledge, social scandal, and a killer whose identity may be far more dangerous than anyone expects.