As disheveled and indomitable as ever, DCI Vera Stanhope leads her tightly knit team of Northumberland police through four more daunting cases. No one seems to know anything about the police officer whose body turns up in a slaughterhouse incinerator, the woman killed in a car crash meant to look like an accident, the suburban neighbor found dead in her back garden, and the teenager whose body floats to the surface of a reservoir. How will Vera break the silence to find their killers?