DI Mike Yorke is coming home. After three months in London, he’s looking forward to being back in the north east – but he’s barely off the train before he’s deep into the most bizarre case of his career. A viciously flogged corpse. Children disappearing. Horrific new street drugs. And buried somewhere is a deadly secret that will lead him down paths so dangerous, he will question the very fabric of society.

1985: A man runs for his life - exhausted, wounded, hunted remorselessly by a woman assassin known only as The Head Hunter. At the end, he has just enough energy to spit in her face. 2001: Sixteen-year-old Kerry Lumsdon runs across the same terrain. She runs to win and she runs to forget. When a headless body is found in the wastelands of the Seahills Estate, Detective Inspector Lorraine Hunt is called in to investigate. Kerry and Lorraine, different ages and from different worlds, come together when Claire Lumsdon, Kerry's sister, is violently kidnapped.

After an elite criminal profiling unit is shut down amid a storm of scandal and mismanagement, only one person emerges unscathed. Forensic psychiatrist Doctor Alexander Gregory has a reputation for being able to step inside the darkest minds to uncover whatever secrets lie hidden there, and soon enough he finds himself drawn into the murky world of murder investigation. In the beautiful hills of County Mayo, Ireland, a killer is on the loose. Panic has a stranglehold on its rural community, and the Garda are running out of time. 

There's a serial killer targeting the streets of Newcastle, seemingly picking his victims at random but subjecting them all to the same torturous end. When the Chief Inspector on the case goes missing, it falls on DCI Ryan to track down the man who is brutally murdering women and goading the police to 'catch me if you can'. As everyone becomes a suspect, Ryan and his team get drawn further and further into the case, but for Ryan the nightmare gets closer to home than he could ever have imagined. 

Criminologist Martin Knight lives a gilded life and is a thorn in the side of the police. But then his wife, Liz, goes missing. There is no good explanation and no sign of Martin.... To make things worse, Liz is the ex-girlfriend of DCI Craig Gillard who is drawn into the investigation. Is it just a missing person or something worse? And what relevance do the events around the shocking Girl F case, so taken up by Knight, have to do with the present? The truth is darker than you could ever have imagined.