Retaliation

Liverpool, 1952. The war is over, but peace has not returned to the cobbled alleys and rusting docks of the city. Ration books still ration hope. Gas lamps flicker over rain-slicked streets where loyalty is bought with blood and silence is paid for in bullets. When Paddy Wright is found bound, tortured, and executed in a derelict Albert Docks warehouse, Detective William Silas Walker knows this isn't just murder, it's a message. Two days later, the Doyle family's nightclub is riddled with gunfire in a retaliatory strike that leaves three dead and the city trembling on the edge of gang war. Silas, a forensic detective obsessed with logic, probability, and the ghosts of his Blitz-bombed childhood, must navigate a labyrinth of corruption, coded loyalties, and postwar desperation. With only his wit, his ginger biscuits, and the occasional draught of Threlfalls mild to sustain him, he races against time to find a snitch before the gallows at Walton Prison swings shut on another life, or his own. Set against the smoky jazz clubs, ration queues, and rebuilt ruins of postwar Liverpool, Retaliation is a hardboiled tale of justice, memory, and the fragile line between order and chaos in a world still stitching itself back together.