A SHORT synopsis

For twelve years, Jo Gale, single parent and ex Detective Superintendent with Cheshire Constabulary has been contentedly living a drama free life with her two children in the small town of Widnes. She revels in the quiet anonymity of it all and rarely looks back at her rather chequered past.

In September 2016, her younger child George encounters a distressed woman on the daily paper round, rambling about a series of deaths and a disappearance from the past that remain unsolved. From their conversation she works out George’s connection to Jo and asks the teenager to mention it to her. Jo, reluctantly, finds herself pulled back into the past particularly when on the same day she encounters four more faces from her police career –  the hapless robber Charlie Gallagher, her ex protege CI Matt Elener, her former Sergeant Sam Walter  and new ACC Mark Garland,  Jo’s former love and the 'one that got away', keen to pick up where they left off. Jo recognises she has been coasting for twelve years and begrudgingly starts to embrace the path she is being led down, confronting the past in all its guises – some more unpalatable  than others. 

The story is told in three timelines covering thirty years following Jo as an enthusiastic, fledgling Detective Constable in 1987 investigating her first murder;  unravelling events in 2001. with two further murders and a missing person concluding in 2016 where all the threads are finally drawn together at a considerable and bloody cost.