In the second volume of the Song Cycle trilogy, Hull private investigator Leo Rivers is approached by the mother of a girl who disappeared a year earlier in violent and mysterious circumstances. Investigating both the background to this disappearance, and the man held to be responsible, Rivers is drawn through a long, hot summer into a world of human-trafficking and Governmental corruption at every turn, each unravelled piece of the mystery moving him further from the vanished girl and deeper into a web of exploitation, greed, temptation, revenge and violence, from which even he is eventually unable to extricate himself without unforeseen and tragic consequences.