A grandfather brutally murdered in a post office raid. A corrupt politician fighting for his future. A police force up for sale. Three crimes leading to one question — who really runs Glasgow? Recently returned to work after the birth of her twins, DS Alex Morrow is called in to head the murder enquiry. The grandfather had helped the gunmen before being shot — was as it a moment of madness, a noble act of self-sacrifice, or did the old man and his killer share a dark past? One city, three crimes and a powerful connection that runs from Glasgow's dark criminal underworld to the international spheres of the super rich.

The last time Maureen O'Donnell saw Ann Harris, she was in the Glasgow Women's Shelter smelling of a long binge on cheap drink. A month later Ann's mutilated body, stitched into a mattress, is washed up on the banks of the Thames. No-one, except for Maureen and her best mate, Leslie, seems to care about what happened to her, and Maureen is the only person who thinks Ann's husband is innocent. But solving Ann's murder comes as light relief. Maureen's father is back in Glasgow, Leslie is sloping about like a nervous spy, and then there's Angus, Maureen's old therapist, who's twice as bright as she is and making her play a dangerous game with the police. In the long tradition of Scots in trouble, Maureen runs away to London. Looking for answers to the mystery surrounding Ann's death, she becomes embroiled in a seedy world of deceit and violence. Alone in a strange city, Maureen starts to piece together Ann's final days. But time is not on her side, and Maureen needs just twelve hours, just twelve, to put things right, and she doesn't care what it costs...

Maureen O'Donnell wasn't born lucky. A psychiatric patient and survivor of sexual abuse, she's stuck in a dead-end job and a secretive relationship with Douglas, a shady therapist. Her few comforts are making up stories to tell her psychiatrist, the company of friends, and the sweet balm of whisky. She is about to end her affair with Douglas when she wakes up one morning to find him in her living room with his throat slit. Viewed in turn by the police as a suspect and as an uncooperative, unstable witness, Maureen is even suspected by her alcoholic mother and self-serving sisters of being involved. Worse than that, the police won't tell her anything about Douglas' death. Panic-stricken and feeling betrayed by friends and family, Maureen begins to doubt her own version of events. She retraces Douglas' desperate last days and picks up a horrifying trail of rape, deception and suppressed scandal at a local psychiatric hospital where she had been an inmate. But the patients won't talk and the staff are afraid, and when a second brutalised corpse is discovered, Maureen realises that unless she gets to the killer first, her life is in danger.

When wealthy Sarah Erroll dies a violent death at her home in a posh part of Glasgow, the local community is stunned by what appears to be a truly gratuitous act. Heavily pregnant with desperately wanted twins, DS Alex Morrow is called in to investigate and soon discovers that there is more to Sarah's murder than it first seems. On the other side of town, Thomas Anderson is called into the headmaster's office at his boarding school to be told that his tyrannical father — a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession — has committed suicide by hanging himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of numb shock. The head of the household is dead, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief, but relief. As Alex Morrow slowly unravels the connections between the two cases, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences.