The stabbed body of a well-dressed man is found slumped on a swing in a children's playground in the heart of Shepard's bush - Detective Inspector Bill Slider's patch.
From the seedy pubs of Shepard's Bush through the brothels of Notting Hill to the mansions of Holland Park, Slider and his team unearth the victim's sordid lifestyle of debts, drugs and dodgy deals, and it soon becomes clear that their suspect is a crime baron who will stop at nothing to keep his identity hidden.
However, Slider is not only up against a resourceful villain, he is also fighting a rearguard action to stop the case being taken off his hands and solved by incomers, and when it is all over he'll find the time to discover just what it is that his lover has been trying to tell him . . .
