Liverpool: a place of heroes and legends. Football, the Beatles, Ferry Across the Mersey – people know this city, or they think they do. The plain clothes department of Merseyside CID know another Liverpool.
Day to day, on the streets, they’re at the sharp end of the fight against the drug pushers, porn barons, paedophiles and pimps who run this great port’s crime networks. In this dark unequal world DC Isobel de Pauli is a stranger – not to crime, but to the ancient, unseen blood connections that pulse in the veins of Liverpool’s criminals… and cops.
Within hours of her arrival, de Pauli comes face to face with the city’s most charismatic and influential crime boss. John Sullivan is as fascinated by her as she is by him, but Sullivan is the least of her worries.
Her new partner, the silent and indistinctive DC Mark Callaghan, knows his world inside out – and he is doing everything in his power to shut de Pauli out of it. Callaghan is the subject of an internal police investigation and de Pauli has already seen enough to raise her own suspicions.
A new job. A new city. Maybe she’ll give it a couple more days. At least until she’s worked out who’s on whose side.