Struggling to adjust back to a life in service to the queen after twenty-five years as a detective, Ton Thorne is forced to work alone when he pursues suspicions that a series of elderly suicides is more sinister, a case that places his life at risk.

When the son of a former high-ranking police officer goes missing, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne finds himself in a grisly maze of past cases that places him in the direct path of a killer.

Tom Thorne's career is on the skids. Having seriously crossed the line on his last case and depressed over the recent suspicious death of his father, the once ambitious police detective has been reduced to pushing papers... and is being encouraged to take a prolonged leave of duty. But someone is stalking the city's most destitute citizens. Three homeless men have recently been kicked to death, each brutalized corpse discovered with a banknote pinned...