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.

Detective Lauren Pengelly has only been part of the Penzance police force for less than two years, but that’s enough time to know that the sleepy Cornish town doesn’t see many murders. So, when the bones of a woman with a hole in her skull are discovered behind a derelict cottage, she immediately assumes the worst. Rallying her team, Lauren is flooded with a strange sense of relief when the bones turn out to be almost twenty years old, not a recent victim. But it quickly turns to dread when she receives her second heart-stopping call of the day–a little girl, Isla, has been kidnapped.

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.

D.I. Duncan McAdam is dispatched home to the Misty Isle. A body has been found buried in a remote location on the Waternish peninsula. Well-preserved in the peat, Isla Matheson—missing for the better part of two decades—is revealed to a shocked island community. A teenage runaway is dead...and no one is talking.

Graham is a detective inspector with London’s Metropolitan police force. He’s a career police officer, an educated, reserved, thoughtful, some might say, complex man. He has suffered tragedy in his life that serves to exaggerate his more introspective characteristics and, like many of us, has to look his demons in the eye from time to time and make tough choices. This box set contains the first four mysteries in this bestselling series.