Book detail

After a blackout encounter in Hyde Park with a brutal older man, Francis, an irrepressibly gay, alcoholic, masochistic painter, begins to be haunted by a police inspector. Does the man Francis refers to as “my own personal copper” suspect the illicit roulette game that Francis is running with the help of his old nanny and his lover of the moment?

Maybe, but when Damien Hiller, a rent boy Francis knows, is brutally murdered, he learns that “his” Inspector Mordren is with the homicide division. When the painter later tumbles over the corpse of one of the all important RAF pilots near a favorite club, he winds up forced to become a police snitch to keep himself and his beloved Nan from a gambling prosecution.

Francis’s work as an Air Raid Warden is a distraction from both his mini-casino and his legal troubles, but as the Blitz intensifies, he finds himself in a cat and mouse game across shattered London.