Having been convinced by their manager, Kane Major, to put their acrimonious break-up behind them and launch a comeback, New Holland, Hull's most successful band of the 1990s, is reforming. Allowing one privileged journalist to document the process.

Joe Geraghty, Private Investigator, is used to struggling from one case to the next, barely making the rent on his small office in the Old Town of Hull. Invited by a local businessman to investigate a member of his staff's absenteeism, it's the kind of surveillance work that Geraghty and his small team have performed countless times. When Jennifer Murdoch is found bleeding to death, Geraghty quickly finds himself trapped in the middle of a police investigation which stretches back to the days when the city had a thriving fishing industry.As the woman's tangled private life begins to unravel, the trail leads Geraghty to local gangster-turned-respectable businessman, Frank Salford, a man with a significant stake in the city's regeneration plans. Still haunted by the death of his wife in a house fire, it seems the people with the answers Geraghty wants are the police and Salford, both of whom want his co-operation for their own ends...

When Joe Geraghty's brother finds himself in financial trouble, it's only natural that he turns to the Private Investigator for help. But when it relates to a missing consignment of smuggled cigarettes, it's not so easily sorted. Drawn into the murky world of local and international criminals around the port of Hull, Geraghty knows the only way to save his brother is to take on the debt himself. But as he attempts to find a way out of the situation, the secrets and conspiracies he uncovers are so deeply buried in the past, he knows he's facing people willing to do whatever it takes to keep them that way.