An eight-year-old boy comes running out of the dark to find barrister Trish Maguire one wet Sunday night in August. Just before he can get to her, he’s trapped under the wheels of a skidding car. The casualty team fighting to save his life find Trish’s name and address sewn into his clothes. They and the police are convinced that he looks like her and must be her son. Only she knows he can’t be. But is he connected with a client, or could he be a blood relation? And who has cut the labels out of his clothes and sent him to Trish? Recovering from a miscarriage, about to go to court with a career-changing commercial case, missing her partner, George, who is in San Francisco, the last thing Trish wants is responsibility for a boy like this. But there is no one else. Her search for his identity takes her to a brutal inner-city housing estate, where she has to confront not only the reality of life for people whose Giros cannot be made to last the week, but also many of her own fears. News of a particularly brutal murder reaches her only hours before she learns that her erratic father is the chief suspect. It will take all her resolution and integrity to pick her way through this maze. Crossing the gulf between rich and poor, between the heroically honest and those for whom life and the law are always negotiable, rip off the last of Trish’s self-protective blinkers. There are choices to be made and lives to be saved.

‘Warmth, sincerity and good characterisation… Raises it above others in the genre’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Convincing and hard-hitting’ The Times

‘Trish is an engaging character, warm, human, and well-drawn’ Sunday Times

‘Like Minette Walters… Cooper writes methodical, meticulous crime’ Mirror