DS Max Lomax

Career campaigner Fraser Neal continually clashed with local businessmen, most recently over the council's selling publicly-owned social housing in the Docklands to private developers and displacing vulnerable residents. Until he's found dead in an alley behind Tennessee Fried Chicken's wheelie bins. Neal was also a police informant – or so he said. DS Max Lomax of Special Operations says he wasn't. No one believes him.

Max's reluctant inquiries into Fraser's murder take him through the rundown estates, church soup kitchens and graffitied shopfronts of southeast London. He's unaware that his investigation is linked to Johnny Nunn, a former boxer living on the streets, who has given everything to the search for his missing daughter. For five years Johnny has been consumed by a vision of finding his girl and bringing her home, but now he allows himself to be drawn into another family's tragedy.

Johnny knows the only beaten man is the one who's stopped fighting.

The killers may not.