Robert Andrew Knox, Dr Robert Andrew Knox, has been brutally murdered: but he is not dead, not yet, his mind as honed and malign as ever.

He has but two aims now: to discover what keeps him from "oblivion, " and to find out who killed him and dumped his corpse on "Ceann Gubha_ - the hill of grief - punishment for his numerous sins and indiscretions.

Knox's chronicles take him back to his childhood with his mercurial mother, his time at St. Gabriel's. Oxford, his dangerous infatuation with a teenage girl and his exile in Belfast, that "Barbaric metropolis."

Thinking does not change anything, he says, but perhaps with the "right degree of sincerity and contrition" he might just get what he wants.