A pacy, evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London's Soho, who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to cracking the cases he investigates, for fans of Laura Shepherd Robinson and the TV series Peaky Blinders.

When Cockney private detective George Harley saves a young girl's life on a dark London night in 1929, he doesn't realise it marks the beginning of an investigation which will change his life forever. The incendiary book which inspired the girl's abduction also seems to be linked to a series of grisly murders that are taking place on Harley's patch, and though he's delighted to be asked by Scotland Yard to help find the killer before they strike again, he could do without the local razor- and cosh-wielding mobsters thinking he's in the police's pocket.

Set during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley's world is a far cry from the country house of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. This working-class sleuth does his 'sherlocking' in the frowsy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho – the city's underbelly – peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers, and Jewish and Maltese gangsters: a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake cigarettes.

Here, the midnight streets are black as pitch and, as Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky as the pea-souper smog and the sins are as dark as stout porter beer, he begins to realise he may never find a way out.