Welcome to Newcastle - where small town villains have big city ambitions. Welcome to the Bug House - home of the detectives whose job it is to put them in their place. Welcome to a new, hard-hitting series rewriting the rules of crime fiction.
Nobody likes a loan shark and the list of people who wanted Ged Salkeld dead would fill the Newcastle phone book. But who would go to the extreme of torching his house while his wife and kids were sleeping upstairs? This is the question facing DCI Theo Vos and his team of detectives from the Bug House as they search through the charred wreckage for clues to the identity of a cold-blooded multiple murderer.
Newcastle, it seems, is a city up to its eyes in debt and, for once, there is not shortage of suspects. But are the dead as innocent as they seem?