While investigating what appears to be a series of tit for tat racial attacks in the back streets of Norwich, Theo Stern is asked to help in the search for gangster, Benny Lyle, said to have been kidnapped from his London home.

But there is something cynically methodical about the Norwich attacks and Lyle is recently reported to have been seen in Norfolk's tiny Georgian town of Holt. So are the Norwich attacks simply retaliatory and has Lyle really been abducted? Stern has his doubts about both and when his investigations reveal that the two cases are inextricably linked in the most macabre way, his belief in the rule of law is tested to the extreme.