London in the late 1980s is an exciting but sometimes dangerous place to live for Fitzroy Maclean Angel making a living partly through gigging as a jazz trumpet player partly through taking illegal fares in his de-registered black taxi cab. When an old university friend plummets to his death through a skylight window it's just the start of Angel's troubles as he gets his arm twisted by the police to help with their enquiries into a group of animal rights activists who might just have something rather more deadly on their minds than a bit of foxhunt sabotage...