"As soon as they see a cop, suddenly no one speaks English," Detective Louis Burrows says about the West Side. This is in a Victor Headley novel, so "West Side" - what does it mean? Hayes, Southall? Somewhere under the Heathrow flight path? Can't be Brixton or Tooting.

The West Side is the west side of New York. Victor Headley's has moved his Yardie gangsters across the Atlantic. Or, perhaps, the Yardies have moved out in all directions from their homes in Jamaica. Men like Ice are making good money running drugs, liaising with other gangsters, trying to keep things in the family, remembering how they used to sit in the Government Yard in Trenchtown. And men like Ice have realised that money does not have to be made illegally - once a man has capital he can move into anything. The problem with the life, though, is that a man can't take all his family with him into the new legit business and he can't leave them to starve either. Ice won't be out of the life in this generation.

Sal Scaffone is another generation - his uncle, the Don, has passed on the family business to him while his own health is failing. Unfortunately for Sal, he is not first rate material, and worse he has forgotten something the Corleones once practised and his uncle has repeated - Sal wants to get into drugs. This means that not only are the police onto him, so are the D.E.A.

Then Sal by some oversight manages to get Ice's sister shot, burned with acid and dumped in a Puerto Rican quarter, as if anyone would believe that those boys would get involved. Sal does not know what is happening when his soldiers start to get shot on the streets. As his stress means he has beaten up another leading gangster's moll while cuckolding him, Sal starts to think things are getting personal and he blames the attacks on acts of vengeance by another mafia family and acts on that assumption. This means that Ice can get in under Sal's defence in his own act of vengeance.

Detective Burrows and the D.E.A. barely understand what is going on, but as an agent disappeared at the same time as Ice's sister Lisa went into Sal's restaurant with a lot of money and came out only with her injuries, the Feds are going to put a lot of effort into attempting to discover the truth. And what Sal can barely conceive of is that the Feds want him for one reason only - to turn him so they can take down Don Scaffone whom they regard as being close to a capo de capo even now.

Cops (bent and straight), Feds, Yardies, Mafia families - Victor Headley finds a place for all of them, and in his heart he has a soft spot for most of them. Considering the violence these people inflict, the teleological argument put by Headley in his afterword (that these people's heirs will not inherit their criminality) does nothing to lessen the guilt of his protagonists. The story flows so quickly, though, that it is easy not to think about that. There's a similar flaw in the plotting - this is actually a locked room mystery (how did the DEA agent disappear from Sal's when it was under surveillance?) which is never satisfactorily explained, but Ice's plotting and working his revenge is done well enough to move the story on and hide that other plot weakness. It doesn't stop the main characters, though, being slags who have risen to the top of the smelting pot with the other impurities.