Lord Ashworth

Liverpool, November 1952.  

The city still bears the scars of war—bomb sites gape like open wounds, ration books dictate daily life, and the fog rolls in off the Mersey thick with secrets. When Lord Edmund Ashworth, industrialist and MP, is found bludgeoned in his locked study, the case seems closed before it begins: his valet confesses within the hour.  

But Detective Inspector William “Silas” Walker doesn’t believe in easy answers. A quiet man with a chemist’s eye and a wartime past, Silas sees what others overlook—a smudge of clay, a thread of coarse hemp, the ghost of oil of cloves in a room of cigars and brandy.  

As he digs deeper, he uncovers a web of corruption stretching from the blood-slicked floors of Birkenhead abattoirs to the polished corridors of Whitehall. Two men emerge from the shadows: Malcolm Hargreaves, a butcher with justice on his mind, and Reginald Pike, a Ministry inspector with murder in his heart.  

In a city where truth is rationed like butter, Silas must rely on science, silence, and the smallest traces of evidence to expose a killer who believes bureaucracy makes him untouchable.