Michael Forsythe is an illegal immigrant from Northern Ireland, working for a crime boss in Harlem in 1992. When he sleeps with his boss’s girlfriend, he and three others are set up to take the fall for a drug bust in Mexico. He breaks out of a hellhole prison, losing a foot and his friends along the way, and makes his way back to New York to exact revenge.

McKinty writes lush, at­mos­pher­ic prose, with a good turn in dialog. Forsythe grows from a bright, feckless teenager, with a future ahead of him in crime, into a hardened, vengeful survivor.