London, June 1940. When the body of silent screen star Mabel Morgan is found impaled on a wrought-iron fence, the coroner rules her death as suicide. Detective Ted Stratton is not convinced and suspects that Morgan’s fatal fall may have been the work of one of Soho’s most notorious gangsters. Meanwhile, MI5 agent Diana Calthrop is leading a covert operation when she discovers that her boss is involved in espionage. Only when Stratton’s path crosses Diana’s does the pair start to uncover the truth. And soon they also begin to realize they like each other a little too much...

Summer, 1944: After almost five years of conflict, London's exhausted inhabitants, battered by the new menace of Hitler's V1 bombs, are living hand-to-mouth in a world of dust and dereliction, and war-weary. DI Ted Stratton is no exception. Still haunted by the memory of Diana Calthrop, the beautiful M15 agent who worked with him on a case in 1940 and whose fate he never discovered, Stratton is called upon to investigate the case of a dead doctor, found in suspicious circumstances on a bomb-site near Fitzrovia's Middlesex Hospital. Was it an affair that turned fatally sour, revenge for a fatal case of misdiagnosis, or, despite appearances, simply an unfortunate accident? Or, as Stratton begins to suspect, is there someone at the hospital who is not what he appears to be and will go to any lengths to protect his fake persona? Ted's wife, Jenny, working at the local Rest Centre, battles on valiantly although her spirit of make-do is wearing as thin as her clothing and she desperately misses her children, who are still evacuees in Suffolk.When a bombed-out and destitute woman appears at the centre, declaring that the man who claims to be her husband is, although identical, an imposter, Jenny thinks that it must be due to the effects of shock. The reality, however, is much stranger and far more dangerous...

A tale of grotesque horror based on the true story of the two most sensational and controversial murder trials of the 1950s.

London, 1956. DI Ted Stratton is tasked with investigating the murder of Jeremy Lloyd, a strange young man with a taste for esoteric religion. Stratton's enquiries lead him to Suffolk, where the mysterious Mr Roth has founded a Foundation for Spiritual Understanding.

August 1958. London is hot and tired, and nowhere more so than Notting Hill, where DI Stratton has just been posted. Stratton’s new manor is dirt poor and rife with racial tension. The end of the war saw a flood of Caribbean migrants. Now, a decade later, working-class Teddy Boys are showing mounting hostility towards their black neighbours. Notorious landlord Danny Perlmann, a Polish refugee, is taking full advantage of others’ reluctance to rent to the immigrants – or to prostitutes – and is making a fortune off the high rents he charges. Caught in the middle of this war over rents and turf is Irene, a young runaway on the verge of going on the game. When Perlmann’s rent collector is murdered, Stratton is called to investigate. Notting Hill is a cauldron, soon to be the scene of the worst racial violence England has ever known, and Stratton is right at the heart of it.