Reporter Rex Tracey has just recovered from his affair with Lithuanian artist Milda Majauskas when she disappears. He's got other concerns, not least an anti-immigration group spreading hate across Tottenham, and a string of attacks on young women at the local beauty spot, Alexandra Palace. But when Milda's body is found, and Rex becomes a murder suspect, he is forced to seek answers.
Amongst the tea-houses and squats, the yam stores and forbidding tower blocks of this little-glimpsed, forever-changing London, Rex unearths a trail of secrets and falsehoods, from corrupt police to illegal factories. But the truth behind Milda's death evades him until the final denouement, when Rex, and the last people to see her alive, must all account for their guilt.
Meanwhile, oblivious to the seismic changes around him, an elderly man tends his allotment, cares for his ailing wife and fusses over his camera collection. Until a friendship with a bewitching foreign girl unleashes a surge of memories from the past he has tried to bury, threatening his control over the present, and the survival of those around him.
