It's 1946 and Danny McRae is a private detective scraping a living in ration-card London. Eve Copeland, crime reporter, is looking for new angles to save her career. It's a match made in heaven. Until Eve disappears, a contact dies violently and an old adversary presents Danny with some unpalatable truths. His desperate search for his lover draws him into a web of black marketeers, double agents and assassins, and hurls him into the shattered remains of Berlin, where terrorism and espionage foreshadow the bleak hostilities of the Cold War. And Danny begins to lose sight of the thin line between good and evil.

1945: The war's over. But there are no medals for Danny McRae. Just amnesia and blackouts; twin handicaps for a private investigator with an upper-class client on the hook for murder. Danny's blackouts mean that hours, sometimes days, are a complete blank. So when news of a brutal killer stalking London's red light district start to stir grisly memories, Danny is terrified about what he might discover if he delves deeper into his fractured mind. As the two bloody sagas collide and interweave, Danny finds himself running for his life across the bomb-ravaged city. The only escape is through that gap in his memory... Will his past catch up with him before his enemies? And which would be worse?