Which of Edinburgh’s most gruesome murders has happened in your street? And were they committed by Burke and Hare, by the Stockbridge Baby-Farmer, by the Demon Frenchman of George Street, by the Triple Killer of Falcon Avenue, or perhaps by one of the Capital’s many faceless, spectral slayers, whose name and misdeeds has long since disappeared from the public eye?

This book deals with Edinburgh’s architecture of capital crime: houses inside which celebrated murders have been committed. In that tall Royal Mile tenement, a woman fell from a top-floor window in 1912 – but was she thrown out by a sinister male presence inside the house, as many witnesses thought at the time? In that old house in Candlemaker Row, not far from Greyfriars Bobby, a woman was brutally murdered by a man without arms in 1919. In that flat in Rose Street South Lane, a horrible triple murder in 1917 wiped out an entire family.

That peaceful little bungalow in busy Glasgow Road is home to one of the Capital’s most impenetrable murder mysteries, which has baffled the police for 54 years. In that stairway in South Clerk Street, a woman was found battered to death in 1995, and her killer has never been brought to justice. And read about Edinburgh’s many forgotten murders, where only the murder house remains to tell the tale.