Some cases do not go cold. They wait.
A fourteen-year-old girl is found at the dead end of a Liverpool flyover. Barefoot. Her hands carefully folded. Dressed in red.
DI Jack Byrne has seen that detail before. Years earlier, another girl in another red dress was found behind a bingo hall. The case was never solved, and the city moved on.
Byrne and DS Emma Walsh do not. Their search for Amy Macer leads through missing-person files dismissed as runaways, St Joseph's Children's Home and a network that recruits vulnerable girls with phones, flavoured vapes and the promise of belonging. Its reach runs from corner shops and dockside warehouses into institutions meant to protect them-and towards a senior officer with every reason to keep the past buried.
As more names surface and a witness becomes a target, Byrne and Walsh must build a case that can survive the people trying to break it. Finding one man will not be enough. The network has been part of the city for years, hidden inside ordinary businesses, useful friendships and official silence.
Red Dress is the first Byrne & Walsh novel: a restrained Liverpool police procedural about the children institutions fail, the evidence they leave behind and the cost of refusing to look away.