When a disgraced politician is found dead at his London flat, there are few people who mourn his demise. George Dent's reputation was in tatters, and his suicide surprises nobody - except one.
Dent's childhood friend Peter Timms is certain the MP's downfall was a set-up; why else was he being stalked in the weeks before his death? Timms can even name the culprit - the only problem is, he's been dead for seventy years. But broke PI Kenny Gabriel can't afford to be cynical. He agrees to round up Dent's old school gang, although some of them are less than keen to be found.
Meanwhile, Meg Dylan, matriarch of a North London crime family, is hot on Kenny's heels with another case. As pressure mounts on both sides, Kenny knows he must find the truth behind this ghost - or become one himself.
Kenny Gabriel is three years away from turning sixty, has forty-three quid in the bank and is occasionally employed to find people who would rather not be found. Broke, clientless and depressed, he knows things can’t get much worse. Then he’s summoned to the office of London media magnate Frank Parr, whose daughter, Harry, is missing—and there’s ten grand on the table to get her back.
It’s a lot of money, and God knows Kenny needs the cash. But he and Frank have a history he’d rather not revisit. Kenny worked for him in the seventies, when Frank was the head of a Soho magazine empire and owner of an infamous nightclub. And Kenny might still be working for Frank now—if he hadn’t witnessed his boss brutally torturing another employee.
Kenny suspects taking this job is a mistake, and he’s probably right. Because while he may be done with the past, the past is far from done with him.
An infamous cold case: two missing, presumed dead. Can Kenny Gabriel chase down the truth?
Rock star Castor Greaves and his model girlfriend vanished twenty years ago after an infamous gig in Soho. According to urban myth they’re still alive—holed up somewhere by the Golden Road, a fabled music-industry ‘disappearing’ service—so when PI Kenny Gabriel is hired to solve the notorious case, he knows he’ll need to watch his back…
But Kenny’s life is in danger already: a brain tumour is messing with his mind, and he may well have nothing to lose. Stalking the seedy clubs and backstreets of Soho, he makes a gruesome discovery that turns his missing-person case into a murder hunt. When his enquiries earn him a death threat from the Golden Road, he feels he’s close to cracking the biggest case of his career…if he can just dodge the hitmen and health scares long enough to see it through.
With the clock ticking in more ways than one, can Kenny untangle two decades of cover-ups and lies in the underbelly of Soho before he loses either his grip on reality—or his life?
