London. The 1960s. The capital is swinging, but underneath the boomtown there's a dark underbelly. Meet Harry club owner, racketeer, porn king, sociology graduate and keen Judy Garland fan. Harry's business is fronting violence with rough charm and cheap glamour; putting the frighteners on, performing menace while desperately trying to jump the counter into legitimacy. Five characters tell five tales that combine in an extraordinary narrative that is both an explosively paced thriller and a brilliantly imagined sociological and topographical portrait of sixties London.

August 1966, the long hot summer of World Cup euphoria is suddenly shattered by a brutal crime that shocks a nation seemingly at ease with itself. Three characters' fates are irrevocably bound up with this event and consequences that reverberate across three decades. An ambitious detective dragged into intrigues of corruption. A gutter press journalist with a nose for a nasty story. And a disaffected petty criminal pushed over the edge by a violent crime that haunts him. An epic story that looks at morality and corruption on both sides of the law and at the very heart of the state.

“Funny, fast, witty, and brutal.”—David Bowie Jake Arnott’s brilliant trilogy of criminal life in England forms a kind of Godfather -like history of Britain’s gangland, spanning 40 years. The first, The Long Firm (1999), caught everyone by surprise and was adapted into a TV series broadcast in the United States on BBC America. The New York Times said it was “a great read from start to finish.” The sequel, He Kills Coppers (2001), was likewise lauded. The third, truecrime, revisits his first triumph, bringing back Harry Stark, an underworld boss on the lam. Harry is rumored to be laying low on Cyprus, the law having given up its pursuit, but someone is looking who isn’t concerned with the niceties of extradition, somebody who has as much use for the rules as Harry.