Liverpool, 1952. The war is over, but its shadows cling to the cobbled streets like soot. Ration books are still stamped, jazz echoes from cellar clubs on Hope Street, and the docks groan under the weight of reconstruction and racketeering.

Detective William Silas Walker, forensic savant, pigeon-feeder, and crossword connoisseur, thought he'd earned a respite after the O'Malley case drained him to the bone. But peace in postwar Toxteth is a fragile illusion.

When four bodies surface, two in the Mersey, two on land, all bound, hooded in hessian, executed with chilling uniformity, Silas knows this isn't random violence. This is a message. And it's been written in blood on the very streets he walks with his wife Carol at dusk.

The trail leads to Granby Street's unassuming barbershop: a front for bookies, informants, and whispered betrayals. Beyond it looms the Davies family, Welsh-born enforcers who rule Toxteth with iron fists and ancestral grudges. But are they perpetrators... or patsies?

As Silas digs deeper, guided by his forensic rigor, his pathologist ally Dr. Sarah Jones, and his ever-loyal constable Harry Coleman, he uncovers a conspiracy that could reach into Whitehall itself. With Scotland Yard circling and political forces stirring, Silas must ask: when the perfect crime meets the perfect cover-up, who decides what justice looks like?

"There are no coincidences," Silas says. But in a city built on secrets, even truth wears a disguise.