Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish novel, catalogs "dead crimes"
for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is
going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects him to cryptic
taunts. His family despises him. And as Prentis desperately tries to
hold on to the scraps of his sanity, he uncovers a conspiracy of
blackmail and betrayal that extends from his department and into the
buried past of his father, a war hero code-named "Shuttlecock"--and,
lately, a resident of a hospital for the insane.