Johnny Doyle escapes a violent past in Ireland to lie low in London, until his former mentor Flynn breaks out of Brixton Prison, hellbent on derailing the Irish peace process with a few well-placed bombs. Unable to escape Brixton, they are trapped together in Johnny's anything-but-safe safe house, sandwiched between a Rastafarian reggae pirate radio station upstairs and a West Indian Yardie crack-dealing gangster, Julius, downstairs.As the charismatic Flynn finds common ground with the Yardies, Johnny fights to realize a peace process of his own, but makes the mistake of falling for Julius's girlfriend Rita, causing all-out war. It is a thriller in the vein of The Long Good Friday, in which questions of race, morality, identity and loyalty play out against a soundtrack of reggae, rock, new wave and soul.