“What you've got to understand is that men like him are the aristocracy in here. The armed robbers and contract killers. They're a breed apart.”

Darren Sinfield, the most notorious inmate at Lower Marston maximum-security prison, has gone over the wall and is thought to be holed up in nearby Avonford, a decaying town with a squalid underbelly.

The intelligence officer tasked with hunting him down, Declan Rennard, was an Avonford man himself back in the day. But times have changed. He used to know where the bodies are buried. Now he’s in danger of becoming one of them.

To catch a criminal, Dec is going to have to start thinking like one and that means entering his own dark history to engage in a twisted game of cat and mouse with a man who plays it better than anyone.

But unearthing the past will lead him into some dangerous places - the brutal world of organised crime, the dirty secrets of the security establishment and an inverted skyscraper under central London that is home to all the stories Britain would rather forget...

Patrick Worrall was educated at a comprehensive school in Worcestershire and King’s College, Cambridge. He has worked as a teacher in eastern Europe and Asia, a newspaper journalist, a court reporter at the Old Bailey, and the head of the Channel 4 News FactCheck blog. His first novel, The Partisan, was inspired by a World War Two photograph of three young female freedom fighters he saw in a museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. The Exile, his second novel, is a prequel to The Partisan. The Aristocracy is his third novel.