England, 1974. A boxer refuses to throw a fight, and Tommy Reilly has him killed on his wedding night. His two sons, eight and five, wake up orphans. Tommy takes them in.
England, 1995. The Premier League has just sold itself to television for hundreds of millions of pounds. The money is new. The violence is ancient. And Tommy Reilly has been waiting for both.
The Dark Arts is a multi-generational crime saga set at the birth of the Premier League—a novel about what it costs to be made by a powerful man, and what it takes to unmake yourself.
Aisha Thompson was hired by the Football Association to review broadcasting frameworks—not to follow a trail of dead bookmakers toward the truth, or to discover that the corruption she's tracking ends two floors above her own desk. She is the only Black woman at Lancaster Gate, in an institution where powerful men have spent careers ensuring certain questions never get asked twice.
Connor Murphy is twenty-nine, running Tommy's empire's legitimate future and trying to dismantle the rest from the inside. He has spent his whole life believing Tommy saved him. He is weeks away from learning that Tommy didn't save him—Tommy made him, carefully, over two decades, out of the grief of a boy who had no one else.
Ronnie Gallagher is the most corrupt referee in English football. His career ended at seventeen with a knee injury nobody treated in time. Now Tommy wants more than bent penalties—he wants Ronnie to fix an entire season, compromise a national doping body, and destroy the careers of three Manchester United players. Ronnie has spent seven years telling himself it's almost over. He is beginning to understand that over is not a place men like him get to reach.
Sarah Turner reads her husband's moods from the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. Rick arrived in Tommy's orbit already broken, and the walls between their flat above the pub and everything below are thin enough that her ten-year-old son has learned to go quiet and listen.
Downstairs, Frank Sullivan plays the Sky Sports theme on an out-of-tune piano every Tuesday night and a pub full of damaged, ordinary people sing along. He has been behind the bar for twenty-nine years. He knows what Tommy is. He is finally running out of reasons to stay silent.
Four lives. One reckoning. Some matches are won before the whistle blows.
