Detective Lou Perlman has become an outcast from police HQ, doomed by a sadistic Chief-Superintendent to a seemingly infinite 'sick-list'. Deprived of doing battle with Glasgow's criminal underworld - which he needs the way a junkie needs a fix - he's barred from participating in the investigation of the bloodbath that has rocked the foundations of the city's lower depths. A new man has powered and blasted his way to the top of Glasgow's gangster fraternity, Reuben Chuck, a villain who promotes cruelty and murder even as he pursues an inscrutable religious awakening of his own. Only a gruesome discovery made in Perlman's own house invigorates him, and launches him into a simple inquiry that quickly becomes a ganglia of perplexities - the whereabouts of his missing love Miriam, body parts, a seemingly haunted house, dubious part-time surgeons, a mob of dangerous hooded teenagers, a ferret, and his own family's history - all leading, inexorably, strangely, to the deathly terrain of Reuben Chuck.