"Career campaigner Fraser Neal continually clashed with local businessmen, most recently over the council’s selling publicly-owned social housing in the Docklands to private developers and displacing vulnerable residents. Until he’s found dead in an alley behind Tennessee Fried Chicken’s wheelie bins. Neal was also a police informant – or so he said. DS Max Lomax of Special Operations says he wasn’t. No one believes him.
Max’s reluctant inquiries into Fraser’s murder take him through the rundown estates, church soup kitchens and graffitied shopfronts of southeast London. He’s unaware that his investigation is linked to Johnny Nunn, a former boxer living on the streets, who has given everything to the search for his missing daughter. For five years Johnny has been consumed by a vision of finding his girl and bringing her home, but now he allows himself to be drawn into another family’s tragedy.
Johnny knows the only beaten man is the one who’s stopped fighting.
The killers may not."
"A senior civil servant dies in suspicious circumstances. A sensitive file in his possession and evidence of contact with a human rights lawyer lead the authorities to believe he is a whistle-blower. This needs a police officer used to operating in the murky world between policing and intelligence. DS Mark (Max) Lomax is a former Special Demonstration Squad officer - a Special Branch unit dedicated to infiltrating political and extremist groups. Following a botched stakeout of a north London gangster, he finds himself on enforced leave and is called back into his old world of half-truths and conflicting agendas. As he digs into the death of the civil servant, Max is obstructed at every turn, forcing him to turn to the people he once betrayed for help. With political reputations on the line, the case becomes less about uncovering the truth, than burying it for good."
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