When ex-mercenary Max Iversson is introduced to nightclub owner Roy Fowler, he senses immediately that the man's trouble. Fowler wants security for a meeting with a group of 'businessmen' who are looking to buy his club. Five grand for a couple of hours' work is too tempting a proposition to turn down, so Iversson, who now runs his own firm of freelance bodyguards, takes the job.

But when he and two colleagues accompany Fowler to a deserted north London industrial estate to exchange the deeds for the money, it turns out to be not so much a double-cross as a bloodbath. Three men end up dead, and Iversson only just getsout alive. Now he wants to know who's behind the killings.

So begins a hunt for answers that will take him into dangerous territory, and also into direct conflict with Detective Sergeant John Gallan. Gallan's investigating the fatal poisoning by snakebite of a doorman who worked at Fowler's club. Leads are scarce and when they do appear, so do bodies.

But Gallan keeps digging away, unearthing in the process a murderous conspiracy that could provide the solution not just to this investigation but to another, more heinous murder that's been lying among the ranks of the unsolveds for a long, long time. Unknown to each other, he and Iversson are also heading towards a final confrontation from which neither man is likely to emerge in one piece.