The year is 1974. Skinheads rule and, on the radio, Terry Jacks is singing about his seasons in the sun.

Eleven-year-old Raz Richardson and his older brother Decko, ever on the lookout for adventure and a way to make small change, dognap an old woman’s Pekinese dog to hold for ransom. The dognapping goes disastrously wrong.

Told in the first person by the protagonist narrator from a distance of 27 years, the prose retains the confused viewpoint of a young boy, conveying his struggle to understand the drastic changes, all somehow emanating from the bungled dog-napping.

The story takes the reader on a journey into Raz’s heart of darkness. Raz must overcome the unacceptable and the intolerable by devising his own rules - rules that will ultimately destroy or lead to freedom.