December, 1940. The area around St Paul’s Cathedral suffers a devastating air raid and the heart of British book publishing burns to the ground. Detective Inspector John Jago must break bad news to a woman sitting in the ruins of her business: her husband has been found murdered at their home in Soho. An antiquarian bookseller, he had just acquired a mysterious, and now missing, volume. Did someone covet it enough to kill for it?

Unscrupulous dealers haunt Jago’s descent into Soho’s underworld, where criminals are branching out in the shadows of the blackout.