On Christmas Eve, Wexford and Burden are called to the Kingsmarkham Hospital. A baby has been stolen from its pram and another baby left behind in its place, and it seems that the mother of the stolen child may also be in danger.

Gwen Robson, a middle-aged housewife who proves to have been a blackmailer, is found garotted in the car park of a suburban shopping mall. Wexford is no sooner on the case than a car bomb goes off and all but kills him, putting him in hospital. This leaves Mike Burden with the task of solving the case, but he goes off on the wrong scent. Wexford's analysis is better, though.

Wexford goes on holiday to Corsica and on arriving home receives a call from a man he met there who claims his wife has been kidnapped. Wexford investigates and finds that the missing woman is in fact dead.

John Creevey has recently separated from his wife Jennifer and is still obsessed with her and Peter Mullin, the new man in her life. Many years ago his sister Cherry had been murdered and her fiancé, Mark Simms, now John's best friend, had been the prime suspect. When the police reopen the case and Simms is again under suspicion, John begins to doubt his friend's innocence, until Mark tells him of sordid details about Cherry's promiscuous past - and her relationship with Peter Mullin. When John discovers a series of coded messages hidden beneath a railway bridge, he throws himself into solving them, as a way of taking his mind off Jennifer. He believes that he has uncovered the communications of a gang of terrorists, not realising that it is just schoolboys at rival public sc

Luke Crossland is a respectable widowed Church of England clergyman, with an important job in a cathedral... but his wife's death came about in strange circumstances, and now Luke's eldest daughter wants to know more about what happened...

Luke Crossland is a respectable widowed Church of England clergyman, with an important job in a cathedral... but his wife's death came about in strange circumstances, and now Luke's eldest daughter wants to know more about what happened...

tuffy young accountant Martin Urban wins a fortune on the football pools, with the help of his friend Tim Sage, and plans to give it away. But then he meets and falls for Francesca, who, alas, is promised to another... Martin is drawn another way, which may even lead to murder.

In the present day, a man goes back to the place where, as a small boy, he disappeared for a day. The circumstances were mysterious at the time and have yet to be explained.

Young Lizzie Crowne goes missing on the Muriel Campden housing estate, and a hunt for her body is under way when she turns up again. Another teenage girl vanishes on the same estate. Then, just after an elderly paedophile is released from prison, the three-year-old daughter of Fay and Stephen Devenish disappears, leaving them distraught. With the police apparently impotent, residents decide to take the law into their own hands.