On a moonless night in the Bay of Naples, customs officers intercept a cargo of four million cigarettes destined for the Italian black market. Hours later, the former captain of a suspicious Liberian freighter, arrested on smuggling charges in England, is taken from a prison van at gunpoint and murdered. Is there a link between the two events?

British customs officer, Rob Sullivan, seconded to UCLAF, the EU’s elite multi-national fraud investigation unit, is charged with finding out. With his alluring Dutch colleague, Claire Colmar, Sullivan must track down and confront the organised crime cartels which control the international cigarette-smuggling business. He must identify the shadowy men behind the contraband trade and bring them to justice.

But the smugglers’ tentacles reach across every frontier of Europe and they will stop at nothing to preserve their billion-dollar racket. Sullivan and Claire follow the bloody trail of the traffickers, hunting them down across the continent. But the two agents’ growing closeness brings pressures that threaten to destroy Sullivan’s marriage. Then his family are put at risk and he realises just how high the stakes really are…