It starts with a phone call to Superintendent Dalziel from an old friend asking for help. But where it ends is a very different story. Gina Wolfe has come to mid-Yorkshire in search of her missing husband, believed dead. Her fiancee, Commander Mick Purdy of the Met, thinks Dalziel should be able to take care of the job. What none of them realize is how events set in motion decades ago will come to a violent head on an otherwise ordinary summer's day....

When Yorkshire policeman Andy Dalziel is rendered dependent on a life-support machine after an explosion, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe pursues growing suspicions about a dangerous group, unaware that the policeman's spirit is watching over his investigation.

Four more two-part murder mysteries take the duo from a private zoo where they unearth a possible organ-trafficking racket, to a community hospital where patients are dying and staff are being attacked. And crimes of passion and chance occurrences bring a past murder case back to haunt Dalziel.

Follows a politically incorrect veteran detective and his well-educated, soft-spoken rookie partner as they solve crimes in Yorkshire.