The Flood Author:Ian Rankin Mary Miller has always been an outcast. As a child, she fell into the hot burn - a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine - and her hair turned white. Initially she was treated with sympathy, but all that changed a few days later, when the young man who pushed her died in a accident. — Now many years later, Mary a single mother... more » caught up in a faltering affair. Her son Sandy, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl - and both mother and son are forced to come to terms with a dark secret from Mary's past.
"The themes that would come to dominate the Rebus books are already here in embryonic form; the blurred boundaries between good and evil; the pull of superstition and myth; the difficulties in escaping and resolving one's past; the emotional complexities of the male of the species; and, not least, a good mystery' (TIME OUT)"« less