"Highly literate and entirely engrossing. One of the year's best literary thrillers."
—The Washington Post

It's twenty years since police detective Alan McAlpine has set foot in Patrickhill Station—and more than twenty years since he fell forever in love with the mute, faceless woman he called Anna as she lay dying in Glasgow's Western Infirmary. Daily he'd watched over her, and they had begun to communicate with each other, she by moving her wounded fingers. Her fingers could not tell the sad, unseasoned police cadet her name, however, or name for him the father of her newborn baby girl or identify the assailants who had flung the acid in her once incomparably beautiful face. Or tell him how she'd smuggled a cache of uncut diamonds into Scotland. 

Now McAlpine is back in Patrickhill, where he's been summoned to head up the investigation of a disturbing murder case. Two women—their arms outstretched, their legs together and feet crossed at the ankle—have already died at the hands of a man the press has tagged the Crucifixion Killer. 

With crimes in the present continually detouring both McAlpine and the elusive killer he pursues into an unredeemed past, the mystery in this steely, piercing psychological thriller is as gripping as its twists are surprising. And absolution proves to be extreme.

Praise for CARO RAMSAY 

"While fellow-Scot Ian Rankin's narrative is unruly, Ramsay's is stately. It works because the story she tells is highly literate and entirely engrossing. McAlpine's passion leads the novel to a conclusion as powerful as it is unexpected. Absolution is among the year's best literary thrillers.”—Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post  

"Let me recommend a first novel by Caro Ramsay, a Scottish author who is able to write scenes of heartbreaking tenderness nestled amid evocations of such grotesque violence that it is difficult to imagine that they can coexist as such sublime interlocking pieces of the whole. A noir police novel, like those by fellow Scottish author Ian Rankin, but with deeper psychological exploration, Absolution marks the beginning of what certainly will be a major career."—Otto Penzler, New York Sun