Liverpool, present day. A fourteen-year-old girl disappears from a McDonald's on Edge Lane, leaving behind her phone, her coat and every easy explanation.

By morning, another girl has been found dead on the remains of the Churchill Way flyover, dressed deliberately in red against the city's grey concrete. She is not the missing girl. That only makes the investigation more urgent.

DI Jack Byrne and Emma Walsh work out of a stretched Major Investigation Team at St Anne Street, where every lead costs time the unit does not have. The trail runs through Bootle children's homes, dockland warehouses, CCTV gaps, missing-person files, and a County Lines network that has learned to use the spaces between police, social care and bureaucracy.

Amy Moore was not just a body. She had a name, a history, and enough fight left in her to force the living to pay attention. As Byrne and Walsh follow the case beyond the convenient suspect and the story the press wants to tell, they uncover a pattern of exploitation protected by fear, money and institutional silence.

Red Dress is the first Byrne and Walsh novel: a socially realist Liverpool police procedural about the children a city keeps failing, and the detectives who refuse to let that failure be the end of the story.