"Rules? They left those behind a long time ago."

Warning a drug dealer about a police raid isn't a mistake. Not for a detective with sixteen years on the Drug Squad. It's a choice. And Tom Kessler knows exactly what it will cost him.

He has spent his career in the shadows of serious crime: surveillance, undercover work, informant handling. The kind of policing that never reaches the press and leaves marks that don't show. He knows where every line is drawn. He built his life on them.

Then crime boss John Falstead turns on Tom's family, and the system he has served has nothing to offer. No protection. No solution. Just process. So Tom steps outside it.

The man he warns is Pete Johnson: sharp, disciplined, one of Surrey's most successful cocaine dealers. Tom should arrest him. Instead he recruits him. In that single decision an alliance is born that neither man can control, and it runs through encrypted phones, violent enforcers and the constant threat of exposure, all the way to the backstreets of Holyhead and Dublin.

It will cost Tom everything he thought he stood for. And it will take him further than he ever meant to go.

A Detective's Dilemma is a gritty British crime thriller rooted in real police tradecraft: surveillance operations, covert informant handling, and the razor-thin line between the law and the men who break it.

Perfect for listeners of Stephen Leather, Neil Lancaster and Simon Kernick.