At the heart of this story is the shooting to death of two
seventeen-year-olds (Anthony Jarvies and Derek Renshaw) at a private
school somewhere north of Edinburgh. A third student (James Bell), only
got wounded in the shoulder, while the supposed killer (Lee Herdman), an
ex-Army man also shot himself. Or so it seems.
It
is left to Detective Inspector John Rebus and his colleagues to dig in
and unravel the mystery behind the killings. And it turns out very
astonishing towards the end. It wasn’t the ex-Army man that was supposed
to have gone insane for some reason that did the killing of the two,
but their fellow student James who’d harbored a deep dislike for them.
He it was that shot his own shoulder as a last-minute cover-up act,
seeing that Lee had taken the gun that was actually his own and then
unexpectedly shot himself. James not only had a grudge against his
fellow mates that he felt were better off the face of the earth, but he
also hated his father, a rather dubious and noisy MP and his admitting
his crime in the end was to spite the man.
The idea of “blood” in the title comes from different angles. The
main one was that one of the dead students, Derek, was the son of a long
ignored cousin of Rebus, so was his blood and family. Different
families were interlinked as the story unfolded. And the nature of
Rebus’s own family and those of some of his colleagues that were
formerly in the Army or forces got inspected along the way.
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