Cover

About the Book

12 DEAD GIRLS.

As dawn breaks on a snowy February morning, a refrigerated lorry is found parked in the heart of London’s Chinatown. Inside, twelve women, apparently illegal immigrants, are dead from hypothermia.

13 PASSPORTS.

But in the cab of the abandoned death truck, DC Max Wolfe of West End Central finds thirteen passports.

WHERE IS SHE?

The hunt for the missing woman will take Max Wolfe into the dark heart of the world of human smuggling, mass migration and 21st-century slave markets, as he is forced to ask the question that haunts our time.

What would you do for a home?

About the Author

Tony Parsons left school at sixteen and his first job in journalism was at the New Musical Express. His first journalism after leaving the NME was when he was embedded with the Vice Squad at 27 Savile Row, West End Central. The roots of the DC Max Wolfe series started here.

Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages. The Murder Bag, the first novel in the DC Max Wolfe series, went to number one on first publication in the UK. The Slaughter Man and The Hanging Club were also Sunday Times top five bestsellers.

Tony lives in London with his wife, his daughter and their dog, Stan.

Also by Tony Parsons

The Murder Bag

The Slaughter Man

The Hanging Club

Digital Shorts

Dead Time

Fresh Blood

Dedication

For Rob Warr of Highbury, Muswell Hill and Hove

Epigraph

‘How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.’

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

PROLOGUE

The Girl from Belgrade

The first thing they took was her passport.

The man jumped down from the cab of the lorry and snapped his fingers at her.

Click-click.

She already had her passport in her hands, ready for her first encounter with authority, and as she held it out to the man she saw, in the weak glow of the Belgrade streetlights, that he had a small stack of passports. They were not all burgundy red like her Serbian passport. These passports were green and blue and bright red – passports from everywhere. The man slipped her passport under the rubber band that held the passports together and he slipped them into the pocket of his thick winter coat. She had expected to keep her passport.

She looked at him and caught a breath. Old scars ran down one side of his face making the torn flesh look as though it had once melted. Then the man clicked his fingers a second time.

Click-click.

She stared at her kid brother with confusion. The boy indicated her suitcase. The man wanted the suitcase. Then the man with the melted face spoke in English, although it was not the first language of either of them.

‘No room,’ he said, gesturing towards the lorry.