So Much Blood

This story takes Charles to the fringe show at the Edinburgh Festival where another nubile girl provokes him, his wife consoles him and a gory murder challenges him. Edinburgh and the Festival are both background and foreground, with Charles flitting between a 'revisualised' Midsummer Night's Dream, a 'mixed-media' satire, a late-night revue, and his own one-man show on Thomas Hood - and with a fading pop star as the first victim, a bomb scare in Holyrood Palace and a suicide leap from the top of the Rock. Charles copes splendidly with the Festival, with his affair with the girl with the navy blue eyes, and with a most complex murder investigation. Of the ingenious solution we will say only one thing: that Thomas Hood can provide the vital clue, in 'The Dream of Eugene Aram'.