Three stories. John Nicholson, the dull son of a strict Edinburgh father, runs away to California and comes home years later to a corpse in a strange house at Murrayfield; in The Body-Snatcher two medical men who supplied an anatomy school find out what they have been dealing in; and in The Story of a Lie a young man's kindness to a raffish old painter sets him against his own father. Stevenson wrote them in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and the Scots ones are as good as anything he did.












