Inspector Coffin decides to investigate some strange goings-on on Murder Street - the most violent street in town - when a man who thrives on reporting and even predicting murder disappears himself. By the author of Coffin and The Paper Man.

It is 1978 and senior police John Coffin has been drafted back to South London to oversee the Local Detective branch. Here, he becomes involved in a game so deadly that everyone is a possible victim...

Marriage is proving anything but dull for Commander John Coffin, keeper of the peace in London's Second City. With grande dame of the stage Stella Pinero in his life, Coffin's days lack no drama. When the curtain comes down on opening night in Stella's newly transformed theater, Joe and Josie Macintosh are found stabbed to death in their theater box. A curious note left next to their bodies reveals that Joe and Josie Macintosh have carried out a suicide pact.

John Coffin takes on the case of a man who claims his father was a serial killer and that as a boy he helped his father bury a victim. Coffin agrees to try to find the body, but then a woman reporter is found dead after digging into the man's past.

The unloading of a consignment of French wine from the steamship Bullfinch is interrupted by a gruesome discovery in a broken cask leaking sawdust and gold sovereigns. But when the shipping clerk returns with the police, the cask and its macabre contents have gone. Following the clues to Paris, Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard enlists the help of the genial French detective M. Lefarge to check motives and alibis in their hunt for evidence of a particularly fiendish murder.