According to Luke

At thirty, Luke Reid seems to have an enviable life. He is a child of the leafy suburbs, attractive in an understated way, tolerant and erudite, socially assured, professionally successful, romantically settled. In short, a textbook example of upper-middle-class contentment. But in his thirty-first year, Luke feels a strange new emotion - shame - when his father, Frank, a leading barrister, is implicated in decades of political sleaze. Unlike his mother, older sister and teenage brother, who try to ignore the whole sordid business, and unlike his younger sister, made helpless by the thought that her Daddy could do wrong, Luke decides to tackle the cancer of corruption head-on. By individual action he tries to make good the damage his father has done.