Rob Sullivan, a British customs officer, is on secondment to Brussels where a tiny unit from the EU's member states are supposed to tackle all excise duty crime in Europe. Much of his work is either boring or frustrating, but occasionally a big fish ripples the surface of their pond.
This time he and his colleagues, including the intriguing Claire Colmar, link two cigarette smuggling operations. While they are pretty sure they can name some of the players they need to prove it, and they want to track back to the real mastermind behind the scheme, but every time a lead appears they reach the witness just after they've met an "accident". Increasingly desperate they begin to take short cuts, with terrifying consequences.
A heart-stopping mix of high precision plotting and cinematic landscapes shows why Paul Adam is fast becoming one of the masters of the modern thriller.
