A sub-postmistress is fatally stabbed in a small-scale robbery, and Frost wastes a lot of time questioning the leading suspects. Then, Helen Tudor, a beautiful first-year psychology student and keen swimmer at Denton University, is attacked on the campus, and suspicion initially falls on her psychology tutor, Keith Michaelson, but Frost's investigations uncover a link with the death of another beautiful young girl swimmer two years earlier, in another town.

Frost investigates two domestic cases. The first is the tragically straightforward murder of a cantankerous old man by his wife. The other is a more cruelly deceptive one, in which a man is killed, and his son and one of his daughters go missing: Frost tracks them down to Blackpool, where she has gone for an abortion - but who was the father? The answer leads him and DS Barnard into a tragic confrontation with an armed and dangerous paedophile.