A pacy evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s
London?s Soho who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to
cracking the cases he investigates for fans of Laura Shepherd Robinson and the TV series Peaky
Blinders. When cockney private detective George Harley saves a young girl?s life on a dark
London night in 1929 he doesn?t realise it marks the beginning of his problems. An incendiary
book that inspired the girl?s abduction also seems to have something to do with a series of
grisly murders that are taking place on Harley?s patch and though he?s delighted to be asked
by Scotland Yard to help find the killer before they strike again he could do without the
local razor- and cosh-wielding mobsters thinking he?s in the police?s pocket. Set during the
Golden Age of Crime Fiction Harley?s world is a far cry from the country house of an Agatha
Christie whodunnit. This working-class sleuth does his ?sherlocking? in the frowsy alleyways
and sleazy nightclubs of Soho ? the city?s underbelly ? peopled with lowlife ponces jaded
streetwalkers and Jewish and Maltese gangsters: a world of grubby bedsits all-night cafés
egg and chips and Gold Flake cigarettes. Here the midnight streets are black as pitch and
as Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky
as the mustard-yellow smog and the sins are as dark and bitter as stout porter beer he begins
to realise he may never find a way out.
