Detective Superintendent Nick Miller is having a bad day. A routine prisoner transport goes sideways when armed men break their target free — a man Miller put away for a string of brutal killings. Now the killer is loose, the Home Office is breathing down Miller's neck, and the body count is climbing. Nick Pope delivers a taut British police procedural that moves at full sprint from London's grimy streets to the Yorkshire moors. Miller is no maverick — he's a methodical cop who knows the system, but when the system fails, he has to bend it before more people die. Pope writes with the lean efficiency of early McBain, all momentum and moral weight. For fans of gritty procedurals where the detective is fallible, the stakes are real, and justice doesn't always arrive with a bow on top.
