When school girl Janey Macklin disappeared from the seedy side of London in 1988, her case went cold, with no body and no witnesses. Now, thirty years later, private detective Kate Marshall has been approached by a true-crime podcast producer with an intriguing question they need her help answering: What if Janey was killed by Peter Conway, the notorious Nine Elms Cannibal? The contract would be the most lucrative of Kate's career, but it comes with a price of its own, dredging up a sordid, complicated past that she would sooner forget ... one that the paparazzi are determined to keep in the headlines. As Kate and her partner, Tristan, scour King's Cross for clues, no two leads seem to point in the same direction. The last person to see Janey alive has already been tried, convicted, and then acquitted of her murder, Peter Conway is in poor health and fading fast, and the line between their clients and their suspects is blurring with each new revelation about the case. With little to work from, can Tristan and Kate wade through clandestine phone calls, decades-old secrets, and deteriorating DNA evidence to solve Janey's murder, or will she remain one of London's countless missing persons, forever lost to time?