Stephen Tompkinson returns as the tenacious and stubborn Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks in three more gripping crime stories. Banks is drawn into a strange and unsettling search for a missing boy. A journalist is found dead at a holiday home in a remote village and a terrible chain of events is set in motion by the discovery of a loaded gun in a young girl's bedroom.

Three new murder mysteries ricochet through the Yorkshire territory of Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. Who killed a boy by arson and buried a young woman while she was still alive? A contract killing, an illicit affair and blackmail implicate a loan shark in Buried. Or has he been framed? And in Ghosts, the fatal stabbing of a university student might have been a routine case if Detective Inspector Helen Morton's ex-lover, an undercover cop, hadn't beaten up the primary suspect.

This season, Banks gets his teeth into career criminal Steve Richards and can't let go -- regardless of the personal or professional consequences. Other cases involve a dead teacher and student, and a kidnapping in Leeds' Chinese community.