Meet Jimmy Costello. Quiet, respectable, God-fearing family man? Or thuggish street-fighter with a past full of dark secrets? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between …

After Jimmy’s wife dies the conflict inside him is too much and the violent assault he commits on a gangster forces him to leave London and his job with the police and disappear for a while. Now he’s back, on what you might call a divine mission … and to settle a few old scores too.

Through the eyes of his hard-boiled ex-cop, James Green takes us on a thrilling journey from 1960s Kilburn, through war-torn 1970s Africa to the modern streets of a London that seems to have cleaned up its act … until you scratch the surface.

Skilfully rewinding between Jimmy's impoverished 1950s childhood, his teenage induction into gangsterism and his switch to becoming a detective, Green introduces a terrifying paradox of a character a God-fearing man running both sides of the law for profit. An ultra-hardboiled debut.

James Green is well known as the author of the Jimmy Costello crime series, the first book of which, Bad Catholics, was short-listed for the 2009 Crime Writers Association Dagger Awards. A prolific writer, James, who is now working on the second of the five-book series which begins with Another Small Kingdom, is married and lives in Nottinghamshire.