Nick Sharman is nobody's favourite person. Ex-cop, ex-doper, invalided out of the Met after a stray bullet in the foot saved him from an investigation into the missing evidence from a drugs haul.
The cops don't like him. The villains don't like him. Sharman is unemployable. So he's hired himself an office and set up shop as a private investigator in his south London patch.
Divorces and debt-collecting were what he expected. What he gets is Patsy Bright, young, pretty and missing. Her father wants her back. She's a good girl, a model, and only a little bit into drugs. With Sharman's connections it should be a piece of cake.
Only when he comes to with a split head, a pocketful of planted heroin, a dead girl and two policemen acting on a tip-off, does Sharman realise this case is different. And serious. And personal.
