They're ancient, they're enigmatic, they're alien and they're here. Eight million of them. The Shian arrive on Earth in 2001, not as conquerors, but as settlers and refugees, seeking a world to colonize. In exchange for access to their highly advanced technology, they are given the right to stay here and now live alongside humanity, outwardly similar but inwardly deeply different, a challenge to all mankind's established notions of society, family, gender, sex and law.

In Ireland a Shian community eighty thousand strong is brought in as a massive experiment in social engineering, a way of breaking the historic pattern of a bipolarized society. The consequences are far-reaching and unpredictable.

The community remains aloof from that country's enduring legacy of division and violence ... then a prominent Shian family is brutally murdered, down to the last child, and human and alien cultures find themselves on a collision course.

Between them stands Andy Gillespie, ex-con and aspirant to the mysteries of the Shian law, the unlikely hero in a hunt for a serial killer that takes him through strange sub-cultures, corrupt religious sects and sinister political organizations, with the police and paramilitaries hot on his heels.

Andy Gillespie is determined to win justice for the Shian - but Shian justice always comes as a price...