Arsenal and England footballer-turned private investigator Charlie Charlesworth uses his sporting contacts, eccentric informants and excessive knowledge of computer games to solve mysteries that baffle the police – much to the annoyance of the Metropolitan Police's premier homicide detective, Frank Drake, who regards Charlie as an imbecile and is even more aggrieved when Charlie starts to date his daughter. Along with Charlie's accident-prone love life and the very real danger of imprisonment for crimes he didn't commit, our hero is battling an addiction – not to sex, drugs or alcohol, but to Football Manager, the computer game that has been cited in 35 divorce cases, including Charlie's, and makes his 20 year-old son Tom anxious that Charlie's starting to lose his marbles.

Trying to solve three intractable and surprisingly interlinked mysteries – why a computer-games heiress has vanished, why the most expensive striker in the Premiership never scores, and why a notoriously belligerent Hollywood actor has taken out a super-injunction against the entire UK press – leads Charlie and Tom into a world of international sleaze, corruption and unsavoury restaurateurs

Author Chris Tookey grew up in Kent but now lives and works between London, Fakenham in Norfolk and Tresco on the Isles of Scilly. For 20 years, Chris was the sole film critic for the Daily Mail in which time he won the Arts Reviewer of the Year from the London Press Club. Since then, Chris has published 5 non-fiction books about film criticism. He is the creator of www.movie-film-review.com, the biggest collection of film criticism in the world and was Chairman of the British Film Critics' Circle for 5 years. Chris has also worked as a TV & film critic for the Sunday Telegraph, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and Observer, to name a few, as well as directing several TV programmes including Revolver (ATV) and Channel 4's After Dark. He has composed and arranged theme music for several long-running television series and has staged 12 stage musicals and a ballet. Chris is a prolific broadcaster, interviewer and interviewee on radio and TV, frequently presenting Back Row and The Film Programme for BBC Radio 4. This is his first thriller novel.