It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the "Evening News" is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page there's a photograph of a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in the basement of a block of flats. It would appear that she has been the subject of a sexual attack. In the back pages of the same paper there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute whose body has been found dumped on a roadside near the McVitie's factory. For Bane - fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords - it's the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart, he searches through the tribes and estates of his bombed city for answers. It soon becomes clear that the two newspaper stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to others - those willing to profit from gun arsenals, human trafficking and a Manchester in decay. The "Doll Princess" introduces the mesmeric narrator, Henry Bane, a conflicted man caught up in a mire of evil, and his creator, Tom Benn - an assured and exhilarating new voice in literary crime fiction.

Henry Bane is dead. Long Live Henry Bane, his son. It's Manchester, 1998, and the funeral party is interrupted by a woman from Bane's past. Róisín is back in Manchester and back in Bane's life after an eight-year absence—inconvenient for Jan, his latest flame. Róisín has brought a wounded boyfriend with her—and a lot more trouble is following them up north. Meanwhile, a Yardie who goes by the name of 'Hagfish' wants to take over the local ganglords' territory with Mary, his terrifying weapon of choice. It's Hagfish against Bane in a new turf war: a war that will claim lives and cement vendettas. Bane tries to honour loyalties, old and new, but this quickly leads to more bloodshed, and a full-blown gang war reignites. It's a conflict steeped in half-forgotten history: a history that Bane and his onetime lover, Róisín, are forever tied to—and which ties them together. With Chamber Music, Tom Benn has written an electrifying noir novel about lost loves, stolen drugs and dragons—a street soundtrack to Manchester's underworld, where anyone could have a gun with a bullet for Bane in the chamber.

It's Manchester, at the close of the millennium, and Henry Bane is now manager of an exclusive nightclub. He has a beautiful mistress, a teenage son, and is making moves in a violent underworld to which he is increasingly numbed. When a young girl is found tortured and unwilling to go to the police, Bane offers to help, and finds horror in a feral community with a respectable veneer. But, by meddling, he ends up endangering those he wants to protect. Not only that, he also manages to incur the wrath of an ailing ganglord, and soon finds himself tangled in a penthouse robbery and an underground boxing match. From the casual sexism of Bane's clubland, to the savage misogyny of a killer targeting the young and dispossessed, Trouble Man takes Bane through a hell, perhaps of his own making, where he is pushed to his limit - and the trouble only gets closer to home. Tom Benn 'does for low-life Manchester what Trainspotting did for Leith' (Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life) and has created a teeming underworld of extraordinary criminals, victims and possible heroes - all with their own brilliantly rendered vernacular - and a noir backdrop of rain, city streets, sharp diagonals of light and very long shadows.