Billie Piper as Shelley

TOMMY AKHTAR (Riz Ahmed) is a low-rent private detective in the manor of his youth in a grimy nook of west London, where the scourge of drugs has driven down property prices and torn apart communities.

He has recently moved back home to live with his cricket-loving immigrant father, Farzad (Roshan Seth), who has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Stumbling into the office one morning, Tommy is delighted when a prostitute called Melody (Cush Jumbo) hires him to locate her Russian co-worker (Amanda Andres), who has disappeared after meeting with a new client.

The search leads to old school pal Lovely (James Floyd), now a highflying property developer, and the local Islamic Youth League run by a mullah (Alexander Siddig), who rails against a society “riven with false idols”.

Heavy-handed interventions from a menacing anti-terrorism officer (Vincent Regan) signal that Tommy’s missing person’s case is part of a far-reaching deadly conspiracy and he enlists the help of a local lad, Avid (Mohammed Ali Amiri), as a snitch.

Painful secrets are exhumed and Tommy confronts ghosts of his tragic adolescence as he rebuilds bridges with his school crush, Shelley (Billie Piper).

Adapted by novelist Patrick Neate from his 2005 novel of the same title, and directed by Pete Travis (Dredd), City Of Tiny Lights conjures a lurid vision of present-day London, enhanced by cinematographer Felix Wiedemann’s visual flourishes like night-time scenes bathed in neon.

Ahmed is a likeable narrator and he generates sparks of sexual tension with Piper, but the script doesn’t give him sufficient dramatic meat to sink his teeth into. There is a lack of urgency throughout the case and, in many aspects, we’re far ahead of Tommy and the police, untangling the convoluted web of intrigue long before Travis engineers his big, yet utterly predictable reveal.