The Crime Code

London after dark in the late 1920s-gambling clubs, fog-bound streets, and one chance encounter that will undo a young Member of Parliament-in-waiting. When a chivalrous intervention on behalf of a stranger ends with her companion lying dead at his feet, a promising life collapses in a single minute.

Convinced no jury will believe his account, the young man flees, swapping his evening dress for a lorry-driver's cap and vanishing into a dingy lodging-house in working-class Camberwell. There he tries to pass as a journalist, all the while watching the papers and ducking the policemen on the beat.

But the boarding-house holds a secret of its own. Behind a neighbor's shuttered door, a band of hardened jewel-thieves with international reach is dividing its spoils-and the new lodger has just become a witness they cannot afford. To clear his name, he must navigate two underworlds at once, never certain which woman is friend and which is fatal.