‘Footsteps echoed through the towering corridors as the woman walked… followed by her silent family. No one could touch her. She touched none of them. She was different. Robbie, young as he was, felt it… had felt her pain as if it was his. It had burned him and left its mark. The mark was the empty space where his real mother had been. The place where she had left him.’It is Edinburgh, 1828, and Robbie is haunted by the horror of his mother’s death at the hands of the famous surgeon, Dr Robert Knox. The operation was intended to save her life. Instead it brought her intolerable pain before it killed her. Now her family is torn apart, and living in appalling poverty. A desperate Robbie is intent on revenge on Knox. But how far is he prepared to go – and what will he lose in the process?