Justice means more than punishing those who commit crimes. It means never giving up in the search for the truth. Justice is Detective Jack Kempson’s creed. Jack Kempson started out as an idealistic cop. Thirty years on, he remains relentless in tracking down villains, but has lost confidence in his moral barometer. He turns a blind eye to the dubious methods employed by some of his contemporaries — prepared to let dodgy means be justified by the noble end. The police brotherhood has allowed him to survive all the crap that happens to him in his private life. But something is shifting in Jack and, when a quantity of drugs signed out in his name goes missing, Jack smells a rat and becomes a whistle blower — he just can’t accept the corruption anymore. This is his first big mistake, because the department turns its back on him, banishing him to the purgatory of supervising data entry into a new computerised crime tracking system. He is sent to rot in the basement. The system being established uses new technology to solve old cases. The data base is not yet complete, but allows Jack to work at what he loves best — solving crimes. Jack works outside the system — unauthorised work — but the crimes he digs up are still crying out to be solved. Jack is driven by the despair of the parents of a boy kidnapped and never found 30 years ago, and the memory of the loss of his wife. As he seeks to find answers from long ago, his journey into the past teaches him that he is not the man he thought he was.

• David Field
• Kikuko Inoue
• Colin Friels