The near-naked, mutilated body of a young black woman is washed up on a remote beach in the west of Ireland. The search to find her killer takes Timothy O'Mahony far from his placid existence as a Garda sergeant in Bangor Erris into the corruption and machinations surrounding the election campaigns for the next President of France. With his prime suspects in the inner circle of Laurent Delahaye, the main opposition contender for the Presidency and womanising one-time leader of the Social Democratic party, O'Mahony finds that even senior French judges and policemen cannot always be relied upon to be impartial when a case may have political implications. His own position becomes increasingly difficult as he follows the trail to the Congo and finds a link between its brutal dictator, a French oil company, at least one of the suspects, and the dead woman. When he loses the cooperation of his French colleagues and is taken off the case, O'Mahony, in his search for justice for the murdered girl and her family, finally has to call on the help of the Irish travelling community, known for their distrust and dislike of the Irish police.

Sylvie is on the run from the men of the Congolese dictator who killed her father and raped her mother. The only way she can survive in Pointe Noire is by selling herself under a false name to oil company men she attracts in nightclubs, discotheques and bars. She knows that if she can leave the country she has the education and good looks to make a success of herself and earn enough money to get her mother and sisters out of the Congo before they are discovered by the Cobras. However the Dictator's men control all the borders They will do everything possible to stop and kill her before she can leave the country. One night she is picked up by a wealthy Frenchman who offers her a job in France and who takes care of all of the paperwork. The first few months of her new life as a highly-paid, sophisticated escort working mainly for the French arms industry and its clients are too good to be true. When she meets a politician who used to know her father she thinks he will help her, but he puts her in a situation as bad as how she was treated by the Cobras.

World-renowned sculptor and hell-raiser Patsy Burke comes to in a cheap hotel in Paris covered in blood and with a broken arm-and no idea what happened the night before. Thus begins a journey through the bars of Paris, during which Patsy, with the help of a few "friends," including Caravaggio and the Scandal Man, attempts to unravel the events of the previous day and night. Along the way, he relives the major occurrences of his past, most of which involve a combination of women, drink, and violence.

Peter Prendergast's brother, Brian, signs up to a radical form of religion after being released from prison in Ireland. One day, the two brothers have a particularly violent disagreement and Peter leaves the house, to calm down. When he returns home he finds two policemen, one of whom is Sergeant Timothy O'Mahony, sitting at the front door of his farm. His brother and mother are in hospital after a brutal attack. And he is the main suspect. Peter not only has to defend himself against a charge of murder but also protect the woman his brother woefully deceived and abandoned. O'Mahony investigates in the rural West of Ireland, and makes sense of a savage killing in a story that comes to an unexpected climax.