A Premier League bad-boy murdered at his newly refurbished home; a teenage runaway's corpse uncovered on a construction site; a gunman shoots up the premises of the local gangland boss - all of them projects run by beleaguered builder Mark Poynter. Can he fix it?

Things seem to be on the up for builder, Mark Poynter. Mark's got himself a nice little earner taking care of the sizeable property portfolio built up from the career earnings of former Premier League bad-boy and local celebrity, Danny Kidd. But when Danny Kidd puts an interested party's nose out of joint by using his star status to gazump them on a development site - the derelict Admiral Guthrie pub - things turn ugly and incendiary, leaving Mark to deal with the consequences.

Meanwhile local villain, Hamlet, uses his subtle persuasion to dupe Mark into unwittingly help him launder vast sums of dirty cash but when it drags the area to the brink of gang warfare, Mark's help is needed to try and broker a truce.

At the Admiral Guthrie secrets from the past meet conflicts of the present - will the rising flames reduce Mark's future to ashes?

"The Red Admiral's Secret" is the second in the series of darkly comic crime fiction novels featuring the beleaguered builder Mark Poynter, aided and hindered in equal measure by his trusted crew of slackers, idlers and gossips, and the lengths they go to just to earn a living.