It's 1974. Detective Inspector Fatima Dieng has been in Shechester, the largest city in the northwest of England, for some time. She is feeling very frustrated. If it’s not the job, it’s the family. 

Things had been so much easier in that sleepy little West Country town where she, her husband, Adama, and their daughter, Hadidjatou, used to live, and where she had charge of a small, relatively smoothly functioning police station. Life had indeed been better in Silbury.

Now her daughter was at university, and her husband just moped around the house all day without a job, without friends, and resentful of the antisocial hours that Fatima, no longer in uniform, has to keep.

At work, in fact, things are really no better. The Shechester and Pepford Criminal Investigation Department has been split into a number of teams, each competing with the others for points awarded on successful conclusion of cases, leading to both the prospect of career advancement and the pick of juicier, higher profile cases in the future. 

Fatima’s team is the most racially diverse in all of Shechester and Pepford CID, not to mention the most talented and innovative, as one would expect, given Fatima’s own superior leadership capabilities. They are called upon to investigate some extremely complex cases, many of them having some connection to security threats posed by civil strife in Northern Ireland spilling over into many parts of the rest of the United Queendom.

But, much like one of the local football teams, Shechester United, the team languishes at the bottom of the CID league table, largely due to running interference from Fatima’s superior officers and so-called colleagues in other teams.

It all comes to a point where her very own future as a police officer looks to be in jeopardy.

This is the third book in the series about the world of Inspector Fatima Dieng. The others were Silbury 1966 and Silbury 1969.