In his Cornish hideaway, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder's solitary life is disturbed by a call from his estranged wife, telling him his 17-year-old daughter, Katherine, is running wild, unbalanced by a rape he feels he should have prevented. Meanwhile, in London, the capture of a violent criminal goes badly wrong, and Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is uneasy about the reasons why, an uneasiness that is compounded when she starts to believe she is being stalked.

A dispute between rival gangs escalates into violence. One teenage girl is left dead, another injured and a police officer is caught in the crossfire. DI Resnick is hauled back to the front line to help deal with the fallout. But when the dead girl's father seeks to lay the blame on his colleague, Resnick finds the line between personal and professional dangerously blurred.

Stephen Bryan, a gay academic, is found brutally murdered in his bathroom. Will Grayson and Helen Walker, police detectives investigating the case, at first assume that his death is the result of an ill-judged sexual encounter. But doubts are soon raised. Bryan's laptop has gone missing - could the murder be connected to a biography he was writing on the life and mysterious death of fifties screen legend, Stella Leonard?

'And in Edinburgh of all places. I mean, you never think of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh, do you...?' 'That sort of thing' is the brutal abduction and murder of two young girls. And now a third is missing, presumably gone to the same sad end. Detective Sergeant John Rebus, smoking and drinking too much, his own young daughter spirited away south by his disenchanted wife, is one of many policemen hunting the killer.

When a man is found in the middle of Alfreton Road in the early hours of a Sunday morning, stark naked and bleeding heavily from a chest wound, he is the latest victim in a series of vicious attacks on men. But enquiries in the mean streets of Nottingham's red-light district have brought the investigations to a dead end. But Charlie Resnick is the man for the job.