Liverpool 1818. It was time for Liverpool's leading newspaper The Mercury to recruit a 'young investigative journalist' who it would it train and steep in its reformist outlook. Fighting for social and economic justice in England's 'port of empire.' On his way to interview, Edwin Kearney had taken a shortcut through storm-battered Old Dock. What occurred that morning would shape his life and affect those of all about him. In the aftermath, he would encounter dark forces feverishly at work in this hectic, tumultuous place. Across its quays and warehouses. On its streets and in its shadows.

Forces and their instruments, locals and their out-of-town allies, devoted to unrelenting crime, privation and misery. The lives and circumstances of its people little more than a commodity to be weighed, bartered and discarded. The brutal physical removal of one community and to enable the imposition of another. Civic dispossession and the pre-emption of rights. An assault on the undefended by the indefensible. In their way, stood the town's fearless newspaper The Mercury, its remarkable owner and the young man who had unwittingly crossed into Liverpool's netherworld and now found himself at the very heart of The Mercury's proposition that 'the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law .' Lives and communities were at stake, the forces against them -native and imported - vicious and formidable- led by one of London's most ingenious and elusive criminals and bolstered locally by his feared Liverpool counterpart. The very existence of Liverpool's crusading newspaper in jeopardy, until a remarkable group of friends and allies also emerged from the shadows.