It's a dead-end, is Grimsby, the end of the track. Next stop the Humber estuary. Or the North Sea. Twenty years ago, on a sticky, brooding summer's night, with all the recklessness of youth, three young, vodka-befuddled teenage girls, bubbling with fun, head for the local park in high spirits, determined to have a good time. Only it doesn't work out that way. Some of the lads with them, a muscle-bound bunch of the local squashed nose society led by aspiring young Godfather, the brutish Roy Vago, are all ice behind smiles.
The appalling result is a gang rape, a vicious and deadly assault on one of the girls. No-one is charged, let alone faces justice in a court. Many in the police are not in the least surprised at that. But the tragic consequences are to blight the lives of all who were there that night.
In the same town, twenty years later, DS Joe Kell, a hard-nosed, drug-dealing copper with a chip on one shoulder and his current squeeze, estate agent Linda Skase, on the other, has just been posted there. He’s handed a twenty year old cold case, and for Joe, it's business as usual, keeping his drug customers oblivious to his day job and his long suffering girlfriend happy. The fact that he succeeds in neither has devastating consequences.
Topping up his pension pot with a quiet spot of backstreet dealing quickly draws him onto the radar of a gang of violent local criminals led by the psychopathic Roy Vago, who were all, it transpires, the prime suspects in a case where no-one was ever charged, and he needs to know why.
This is a gritty, down-to-earth story of everyday criminal folk - their dreadful deeds, the consequences, and the rich vein of black humour that bleeds through their heartless business, always it seems, a few steps ahead of the local CID.