Mired in the world of errant wives, missing persons fleeing mundane bills, businesses pursuing dishonest staff and petty personal transgressions, Stevie McCabe is suddenly asked to investigate the affairs of a local Labour MP.

Although he knows his client is lying, the commission gets his attention, especially because his unrequited lust for the owner of a jazz club has somehow turned into an asylum appeal for one of her singers and most especially because an old friend he can barely remember is asking him for a pro-bono investigation of the lurid death of his junkie brother.

Through the peeling tower blocks and smart sandstone tenements of the city, from university to squalid bed and breakfast hotels, McCabe pursues the trails of the dead junkie and the questionable MP, knowing that they should be unconnected, yet knowing, too, that the strict limits of coincidence are being bent and broken by the ways in which the stories intertwine.