'Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest; moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother's favourite. And he was a murderer'.

B.B. is a forty-tow-year-old hospital porter still living at home with his mother in a Yorkshire village. His social life is played out online, on a website called badguysrock. There, he stalks Albertine, with whom he shares a troubled past, and spins dark murder-fantasies - especially about his mother. As the story of their tortured relationship unravels, so does that of his blood feud with his brothers, the poignant tale of a blind child prodigy, and the poisonous truth lurking in the rotting heart of one disturbed family.