The mermaids singing: "A serial killer is on the loose in the northern city of Bradfield. Four men have been brutally killed by savage knife wounds. In each case, the men have been mutilated and tortured, though the mutilations are not identical and nothing obvious appears to connect the victims. Fear grips the city; no man feels safe. Clinical psychologist Tony Hill is brought in to profile the killer, to work alongside Detective Inspector Carol Jordan."

Wire in the blood: "Young girls are disappearing around the country. Everyone assumes they are teenage runaways, headed for the city and bright lights. They vanish without trace - society's disposable children. There is nothing to connect them to each other, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind. Nobody moves around inside the messy heads of serial killers like Dr. Tony Hill. Now heading up the recently founded National Profiling Task Force, he sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of thirty missing teenagers and ask to use their new techniques to discover whether there is a sinister link between any of the cases. Only one officer, Shaz Bowman, comes up with a concrete theory, but it is ridiculed by the rest of her group ... until a killer murders and mutilates one of their number. Could Bowman's outrageous suspicion possibly be true?"