It was hard for me to rate this book because at various points I really dug it and at other various points I almost gave up on it. O'Neill did a great job portraying and developing some of the characters and I particularly enjoyed Inspector Groves in all his blustering glory. But on the other hand, the plot became overly weird and wandered into some rather unexpected territory that I don't think worked. He really did his research on Victorian Edinburgh (always a big plus in my book-I loved the historic photographs underneath the chapter titles) and it was a nice escape from other books of this genre that seem to be almost always set in London. I guess in the end, I would recommend it only to people that I was fairly comfortable with their taste in books to know they'd enjoy it, because I'm not sure most people would.