Why would anyone want to kill a harmless old German scholar ...? Unless he wasn't harmless at all! This is the thought that immediately occurs to Detective-Inspector Nightingale when he is caught up in the investigation into the untimely end of Doctor Seifert in Edinburgh, battered to death behind the bookstacks in the University Library. But in what way did someone see him as a threat? Nightingale can't being to imagine. Seifert was an authority on runic writing. But runes, unreadable to all but a few, are hardly good cause for murder. Or are they?