It’s a sweltering summer in Hull: gray storm clouds gather ominously over this small English city, yet refuse to break. Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy and the rest of the Serious and Organized Crime Unit are being pushed to the brink by the local drug trade as a sadistic new boss takes over and violent crime escalates. But it’s not long before McAvoy and DS Trish Pharaoh are distracted by something deadlier: a serial murderer with a taste for the grisly and macabre. McAvoy comes to suspect these are actually copycat murders, committed as revenge for mishandled police investigations conducted years ago. But when one of McAvoy’s fellow police officers is blackmailed by the local drug kingpin, McAvoy’s life—and that of his wife, Roisin, and of the couple’s two young children—is suddenly in fearful jeopardy.
