Detective Sergeant Lou Perlman is an outcast from police HQ, doomed by the chief superintendent to a seemingly infinite 'sick-list'. He's barred from investigating the bloodbath that has rocked the foundations of the city's lower depths. A new man has powered his way to the top of Glasgow's gangster fraternity: Reuben Chuck is a villain who promotes cruelty and murder whilst he pursues an inscrutable religious awakening of his own. A gruesome discovery made in Perlman's own house launches him into an enquiry that becomes fraught with perplexities - the wherabouts of his missing love, Miriam; body parts; a seemingly haunted house; dubious part-time surgeons; a mob of dangerous hooded teenagers; and his own family's history - all leading, inexorably, to the deathly terrain of Reuben Chuck.