The nude photo of a teenage runaway shows up on a pornographic website, and the girl’s father turns to Detective Chief Inspector Alan banks for help. But these are typical circumstances, for the runaway is the daughter of a man who’s determined to destroy the dedicated Yorkshire policeman’s career and good name.

          Still it is a case that strikes painfully home, one that Banks — a father himself — dares not ignore as he follows it’s squalid trail into teeming London, and into a world of drugs, sex, and crime. But murder follows soon after — gruesome ,sensational, and, more than once — pulling Banks in a direction that he dearly does not wish to go: into the past and private world of his most powerful enemy, Chief Constable Jimmy Riddle.