This book covers the specialty topic of endocrine surgery. There are eight chapters of almost equal size covering the various glands involved plus chapters on genetics/familial disease and clinical governance. The scalpel icons help with the large number of references. My major criticism is that not all of these glands have equal importance in endocrine or glandular surgery and this affects the overall quality of the book. The chapters on endocrine pancreas and carcinoid cover the ‘smallest volume areas’ and are two of the three best chapters in this book. There has been an effort to distinguish endocrine pancreas from exocrine pancreas but salivary gland disease gets a chapter of similar length to thyroid disease. The parathyroid chapter is the third outstanding one of this book. It is in depth, relevant in its proportions and very insightful, with a real sense of giving the opinion of supremely experienced parathyroid surgeons. The chapter on carcinoid tumours is similar in the means of its success. The authors are world leaders in this field and much of the evidence base comes from them. The chapter benefits from superb colour reproductions and good line diagrams. The thyroid chapter is too short. The section on thyroid cancer is weak as a consequence of its brevity. As an endocrine examinee for the FRCS examination (reading the 3rd edition), I had to find another text for this topic. It has a good description of Graves' disease but again this is a low-volume topic given almost equal page space as goitres and cancers. More colour images would have helped the thyroid and adrenal chapters enormously, and currently the thyroid chapter is too brief for the series' aims. Despite this, the book has some real high points: the parathyroid, carcinoid and endocrine pancreas chapters are a class apart and worth the price just for themselves.