Don McRae has followed boxing all his life, despite the fact it often disappoints and upsets him. In recent years, Don McRae’s immersion in contemporary boxing had not been at the pitch of intensity he had felt in the 1990s, when he wrote Dark Trade, a book which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

But when his sister died in September 2018, at a time when cancer had taken hold of his mother, with his father and mother-in-law to be similarly affected soon after, he sought refuge in boxing again, desperately hoping it would offer respite and some strange kind of comfort.

Sadly, his re-immersion reveals that corruption, doping and criminality gnaw away at the soul of boxing. As McRae investigates further, he begins to wonder if the time will soon come for him to finally escape a troubled, and troubling, business for good . . .

In this book, both his most personal and explosive, he tries to reconcile the contradictions of hope and despair, salvation and ruin which lie at the murky heart of a sport he’s followed for 50 years.