If it bleeds

the long version

Infamous gangster Charlie Hook wants someone to write his biography. He chooses crime reporter Laurie Lane as ghost writer. But the next day Hook is dead, his blood and hair on the walls of his north London mansion. Who killed the last of the London Godfathers? Laurie needs to find the killer to keep his job. There are several possible suspects: the Russian businessman with something dodgy in his Hampstead garden, Hook's two sinister public schoolboy sons, and the relatives of men whom Hook had killed decades ago. And what secrets lurk in Hook's empire? Laurie's search for the killer takes him to the bars of Thailand, and the bowels of the Old Bailey - as bizarre and hair-raising a journey as it is potentially lethal ...