In this installment of the Cal Innes series, our hero gives up acting as a pawn in Manchester’s underworld disputes. He has his own burdens to bear and scores to settle --- with the Tiernan family, with Sergeant Donkin, and with the darkness in his own past.

In his career as Manchester’s most indestructible private eye, Callum Innes has been run over, beaten within an inch of his life, shot in the ear, left for dead on a desert roadside, and halfway blown up by a car bomb. Now, mourning his brother and walking with a cane following a massive drug-related stroke, Cal is a wreck. Enter the Manchester crime lord Morris Tiernan to make his life even worse. Tiernan’s son Mo has gone missing, and Innes is the only person the distraught gangster trusts enough to conduct the search. There’s nobody Cal would like to find less, but you don’t say no to Uncle Morris. And it turns out that Innes is not the only one on the case --- the corrupt Detective Sergeant “Donkey” Donkin has an interest in the fate of the Tiernans, as well as a long-standing grudge against our intrepid shamus.

In this installment of the Cal Innes series, our hero gives up acting as a pawn in Manchester’s underworld disputes. He has his own burdens to bear and scores to settle --- with the Tiernan family, with Sergeant Donkin, and with the darkness in his own past.

Commander Jana Matinova must push through Slovakia's secretiveness to discover what connects the murder of Klara Boganova to a man run down in Paris, a dead Turk with an icepick in his eye, and an international network of bank accounts linking back to the Second World War.

When the wife of one of Slovakia's most prominent businessmen is killed in a very public assassination, it looks like the bullets were meant for her husband. But could the wife of Oto Bogan have actually been one of the primary targets? And where has Bogan gone? Both he and his son have disappeared without a trace. Commander Jana Matinova was present at the party where the shooting took place, and she was the one who pushed Bogan out of the line of fire. As a witness to the crime, she's being told to stay away from the case, but her Colonel knows that he needs his best investigator on it.

Jana must push through her own government's secretiveness and intransigence to discover what connects the murder of Klara Boganova to an anonymous man run down in Paris, a dead Turk with an icepick in his eye, and an international network of bank accounts linking back to the Second World War. The key to the case may lie with a mysterious, vagabond girl who has attached herself to Jana and who seems to be connected to the notorious international criminal Makine, AKA Koba. To solve the case and stop an ongoing series of murders, Jana must travel to Berlin and Paris and look back into the darkest period of Slovak history.