Malcolm Richards used to be one of Liverpool’s best Detective Sergeants in serious crime, but now he is a broken man surviving on tramadol and documenting cheating husbands to pay the rent above a bookmaker’s in Kensington. Three years after a disastrous operation in Toxteth left his partner in a coma and his own body shattered, Mal’s life has settled into a rhythmic, grey routine of “Tuesday afternoons when the work has dried up and the rent hasn’t”. The arrival of a mysterious woman with a routine “honey trap” case seems like the work of a slow Tuesday, but a single photograph captured in the background of a wine bar suddenly makes Mal the target of a ruthless criminal network.
After being thrown off a building and left for dead, Mal’s reality undergoes a startling transformation: the city of Liverpool drains of colour, morphing into a sharp, shadow-heavy 1950s noir landscape. In this black-and-white world, every face carries its meaning on the outside and the world presents itself in archetypes—the heavy, the boss, the rat—allowing Mal to read the city with a clarity he hasn’t felt in years. As he navigates this shifting perception, he discovers that his new case is inextricably linked to the night that ruined his life three years ago. Caught between a weaponised institutional welfare file designed to discredit him and a powerful family built into the city’s very foundations, Mal must use his fractured vision to uncover a truth that everyone else is desperate to keep buried in the dark.