There's a bad vibe. A professor of psychoacoustics is found dead in his office. A suspected heart attack, until a second acoustician dies under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, an outbreak of mysterious illnesses on a council estate, outbursts of unexplained violence in a city centre nightclub, and strange noises coming from the tunnels underneath Liverpool. Can it really be a coincidence that death metal band Total Depravity are back in the city, waging their own form of sonic warfare? Detective Inspector Darren Swift is convinced there are connections. Still grieving his fiancé's death and sworn to revenge, he is thrown back into action on the trail of a murderer with a terrifying and undetectable weapon. But this case cannot be solved using conventional detective work, and D.I. Swift will need to put the rulebook aside and seek the occult expertise of Dr. Helen Hope and her unlikely sidekick, guitarist Mikko Kristensen. You can't escape the noise. Only the memory of silence can comfort you. Or death itself.