After the accident, DC Cameron Stone had spent three months in intensive care before he could even recall what happened: the high speed pursuit of a vice baron through the night streets of Glasgow that had not only almost finished him but had taken the life of a teenage mother and her child. Then there’d been the message from Audrey on the back of a ‘get well soon’ card announcing that she had left him and taken their young son, Mark, with her. Booze, anti-depressants and therapy have all failed to enable him to resume his old job.

So now Stone lives in a one-room flat in the worst part of town. He pays the rent by running errands for a private detective agency. His tasks include tracking down a teenage runaway and surveillance for a woman who thinks her husband is sleeping with her sister. He’s also paid by his former colleagues, doing the work that’s not quite clean enough for them to do themselves- like putting the fear of God into Jason Campbell, a newly released sex offender whose been seen hanging around the local High School in his soft-top Mercedes.

Stone is having a bad week. Audrey is getting difficult about contact arrangements for Mark. She’s moved into the plush home of a plastic surgeon: there’s talk of marriage- and adoption for Mark. He finds his runaway in a brothel and just gets roughed-up for his trouble. There’s the knife wielding kids who try to mug him on the stairs and the daubing on his front door: Burn in Hell Baby Killer. The only brightness on his horizon is his growing friendship with Liz, the sunny Irish nurse who lives on the next floor. But then petrol is poured through his letterbox and his flat ablaze. And now a stranger has turned up at the school and driven off with his son…