Having worked my way through the entire Rebus catalogue since Christmas, I was looking forward to finishing up with a different style of story. I normally enjoy short stories and couldn't wait to dive in. I could not have been more disappointed: the stories were incredibly predictable which came as a shock after the intricacies of the Rebus novels. Even the Rebus stories were uninspired and the novella which was the main impetus for me to purchase this book was a slight reworking of one of the novels, retold from a slightly different perspective! Rankin is not the first author to bundle together short stories for an easy sell but I feel that these works fall far short of his normal excellent standard.