Loose Threads: the new laugh out loud crime novel from Martin Stewart

When Dr David Cairney goes missing on the way home from his retirement party, his wife asks ex-boxer and journalist Robbie Gould for help. Gould wants nothing to do with it . . . but he needs the money. Soon he is plunged into a world of missing Kremlin diamonds and pre-digital espionage – all coded signals, orange peel and scraps of red thread. Three homicidal maniacs. Two radioactive shoes. One body in a suitcase. One of LoveReading's Best Books of 2026. When Dr David Cairney, a politics lecturer, goes missing on the way home from his retirement party, his wife asks ex-boxer and journalist Robbie Gould for help. Gould wants nothing to do with it. But he needs the money. Meanwhile, the body of another politics lecturer, Professor Stephen Hogg, has been found, his body folded into a suitcase beside the Clydeside Expressway. While poking around the murder victim’s office, Gould encounters pathologist Sarah Badar. She worked on Hogg’s post mortem, only to find her report redacted, and she wants answers too. As the pair delve deeper into the case, they unearth connections between the two academics and a rogues’ gallery of oddballs and grotesques including rival gangsters from Edinburgh and Glasgow, a llama-farm owner in Kirkintilloch and an ex-KGB general with a trepanned skull and a thirst for vengeance. Sarah and Gould find themselves immersed in a world of missing Kremlin diamonds and pre-digital espionage – all coded signals, orange peel and scraps of red thread.