Which is worse: A psychopathic killer or murderous corruption?

The second book in Derek Raymond's acclaimed Factory Series opens with the chilling discovery of a horribly butchered body abandoned in a warehouse by the Thames. It's obviously the work of a contract killer, but why would a professional leave the body for discovery?

With his usual mix of cunning and nerve, the unnamed Detective Sergeant from the Unexplained Deaths Department stands up to both mobsters and his superiors to get to the truth. He soon finds himself engaged in a harrowing game of cat-and-mouse with a psychopathic murderer who seems to have ties to the highest levels of the British government.

When one of his superiors warns him to back off, saying, ""You'll always get the shitty end of the stick,"" he explains, ""Maybe, but I think that's the end where the truth is.""

Praise for Derek Raymond's Factory Series

""It’s one of the darkest and most surrealistically hard-boiled things I’ve ever read. The detective is at least as scary as the murderers he’s chasing.""
—William Gibson, bestselling author of Neuromancer

""No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books.""
—James Sallis, author of Drive

""The Factory novels are certainly the most viscerally imagined of their kind that I've ever read, or reread multiple times.  Derek Raymond wrote in a supposedly escapist genre in a manner that precluded any hope of escape.""
—Scott Phillips, bestselling author of The Ice Harvest

""There remains no finer writing – crime or otherwise – about the state of Britain.""
—David Peace, author of ""The Red Riding Quartet.""

""Carve Derek Raymond’s name into the literary pantheon. He is one of the rare authors who seek to understand evil, ferret out the darkness in human nature, and blast Noir fiction out of the genre ghetto and into Literature. His nameless detective's quest through the bleak streets gets under your skin. Amazing, painful and brilliant.""
—Cara Black, bestselling author of Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

""I Was Dora Suarez blew me away - beyond hard boiled.""
—Patton Oswalt

""More Chandleresque than Chandler... [Raymond] could write beautifully...and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the important subjects any writer can deal with: mortality and death.""
—Will Self

""A bizarre mixture of Chandleresque elegance... and naked brutality""
—The Daily Telegraph

""I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with the skull beneath the skin.""
—The Times (London)

“A crackerjack of a crime novel, unafraid to face the reality of man’s and woman’s evil.”
—Evening Standard

""The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel.""
—Charles Taylor, The Nation

""Hellishly bleak and moving.""
—New Statesman

""These are dark, horrible and lovely.""
—Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers