Frankie James is a young man with a lot on his shoulders. His mother disappeared when he was sixteen; his father's in jail for armed robbery; and he owes rent on his Soho snooker club to one of London's toughest gangsters. Things, you'd think, can only get better. Actually, they're about to get a whole lot worse.

He always swore to his mum he'd keep his younger, wilder brother out of trouble, but when Jack turns up at the club, covered in someone else's blood, and with the cops hard on his heels, Frankie has no choice but to enter the sordid world of bent coppers, ruthless mobsters and twisted killers he's tried all his life to avoid.

But in the dog-eat-dog underworld of 1990s Soho - as a vicious gang war rages between London's two foremost crime families - will Frankie be tough enough, and smart enough to come out on top?