It is the night before Christmas & you're just about to snuggle up into bed for one last sleep before the big day...
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Christmas is coming & DI Staffe is trying to make a go of it with his on-off girlfriend, Sylvie, when a murdered woman is discovered in a swanky City hotel room. Staffe becomes obsessed with Elena Danya, the dead, blonde & beguiling, high-end prostitute. When another, altogether more down-at-heel working girl, is killed & their mutual, aristocratic friend & bad-girl, Arrabella, goes missing, Staffe is drawn into the whole gamut of London's alien niches: brothels & gentleman's clubs; banks & tenement estates. The evidence begins to point to a coy sociopath & voyeuristic predator, Graham Blears, but Staffe is not convinced & is increasingly drawn away from the city & towards the roots of a tangled m?nage of City banker, Russian oligarch, & Turkish playboy, forcing himself down into the higher echelons of the British establishment, whose barricades begin to stonewall the investigation. When his Chief, Pennington, cuts him loose, Staffe becomes the hunted instead of the hunter, with grave consequences for the women who are close to him.