Aaron Tyler and his poker club friends apprehend and accidentally kill an intruder in his house. Thus begins a descent into a web of violence that may cost them everything - their jobs, families and ultimately their lives.

No act of violence ever truly dies away... the effects of it go on for ever. The old princess, relic of an Eastern European royal house, could see plenty of it in her crystal ball: John Coffin on the run, three separate women and three separate acts of violence. There was the ghostlike girl in the upper room, the girl from Wolverhampton and the princess herself, who studied the psychology of poisoning.

John Coffin had left his wife and his job after he had been concussed while making an arrest. Moving from place to place within his own part of South London he finds himself in a nightmarish web of violence. Net he can never be sure whether what he sees is really happening or whether it is something emanating from his own disturbed mind....