On a hot summer morning, Miles Law cycles into the village of Millington in the Vale of York, on his way to a few hours' work as an under-gardener at The Grange. But when he arrives, he finds his employer slumped in an armchair in the drawing room, a bullet wound on his forehead. Miles' employer was a secretive and reclusive man who kept his employees and neighbours at a distance. Who was Anthony Garrett, and who are the three young, identical-looking blonde women who called at the house a few days before his body was discovered? 

George Hennessey is beginning to accept the inevitable - that age is catching up with him and he needs to delegate to his young up-and-coming team. But there is no substitute for experience as he marshals his troops to investigate two parallel murders committed 20 or so years apart. First, a young man limps back from his father's funeral to report a murder he only now feels able to disclose. But naturally things are not quite as straightforward as they seem.

A chance sighting of a vase for sale in an antique shop leads Detective Chief Inspector Hennessey and his team to take a fresh look at a 20-year-old unsolved murder case. As the investigation opens out and links are made to other unsolved murders in the Vale of York and beyond, the net seems to be closing around a mysterious gang of killers and a vow of silence that's been kept for two decades. But when a new body is discovered in a local wood, is that pact about to be tested?

When Matthew Hopkins left his hellhole council flat to seek out funding for his heroin addiction, he spotted a plastic bag on the landing outside. Pouncing on it hopefully, he found it contained only a number of bones. Human bones, but from a number of different people, all victims of the same killer. Both the bags and the bones open up more than enough avenues of investigation for Chief Inspector Hennessey and Sergeant Yellich.

When a deep grave containing five skeletons is discovered in the corner of a field, DCI Hennessey and his team of officers from the Vale of York Police are called in to investigate. The burial site had lain undiscovered for over 20 years and was only found after a chance conversation between two old friends revealed the possibly sinister reason for the area of disturbed soil that they had both noticed during their last summer of innocence. The resulting police inquiry soon uncovers a multiple murder that seems to have its roots in a legal dispute between two families which can be traced back to the aftermath of the English Civil War.

1894. A well-respected academic is found dead in a gentlemen’s convenience cubicle at the British Museum, the stall locked from the inside. Professor Lance Pickering had been due to give a talk promoting the museum’s new 'Age of King Arthur' exhibition when he was stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Having forged a strong reputation working alongside the inimitable Inspector Abberline on the Jack the Ripper case, Daniel Wilson is called in to solve the mystery, and he brings his expertise and archaeologist Abigail Fenton with him.

A tip-off leads police to dismantle a pile of rubble in the village of Pendwick, in search of a hidden body. As expected, a corpse is found and is identified as being that of a local businessman who has been missing for 10 years.

Hennessey and Yellich - along with an ever-expanding team -head up the ensuing murder investigation. And then two further bodies are discovered - along with a particularly nasty brand of political extremism involving just a few too many respected local businessmen.

When five corpses in various states of decomposition are found chained to the walls of an overgrown kitchen garden, George Hennessey and Somerled Yellich, assisted by Carmen Pharaoh, Thomas Ventnor and Reginald Webster, quickly begin their investigation into these shocking murders. The recently deceased owner of the large country house had been housebound for the last 25 years and would have had no idea of the appalling crimes that were taking place just yards away.

A police officer finds a badly injured man lying in a street in the centre of York in the early hours of the morning. The man subsequently succumbs to his injures without regaining consciousness. Hennessey and Yellich are brought in to investigate, along with the other members of the team, Ventnor and Pharoah.

Strangefields Farm is notorious for its sinister history ever since serial killer Jackson Temples lured young women to the premises, and the girls never left alive. Now, decades later, Strangefields is being transformed into a holiday village, but the developer's hopes of its dark past being forgotten are ruined when a skull is found on the site. Police suspect it belongs to one of Temples' victims, and when a local florist is found murdered in an echo of Temples' crimes, DI Wesley Peterson fears a copycat killer could be at large.