Little Marcus Fallbrook was kidnapped in 1976 and when he never returned home, his grieving family assumed the worst. Then, thirty years later, teenage singing star Leah Wakefield disappears and DI Wesley Peterson has reason to suspect that the same kidnapper is responsible. And another abductor is at work in the area - a man who tricks blonde women into a bogus taxi and cuts off their hair.

Has Leah fallen prey to the man the newspapers call 'The Barber' or has she suffered a more sinister fate? But then Marcus Fallbrook returns from the dead. And when DNA evidence confirms his identity, the investigation takes a new twist. Meanwhile, archaeologist, Neil Watson's gruesome task of exhuming the dead from a local churchyard yields a mystery of its own when a coffin is found to contain one corpse too many - a corpse that may be linked to a strange religious sect dating back to Regency times.

Wesley has his hands full elsewhere - slowly, Marcus Fallbrook begins to recover memories that Wesley hopes will lead him to cunning and dangerous murderer. But he is about to discover that the past can be a very dangerous place indeed.