Tony Hill is asked by the Home Office to form a national task force of trained psychological profilers, a hit squad capable of moving in on particular complex cases He gives his new team the details of thirty missing teenagers and asks them to discover whether there is a sinister link between any of the cases Only one officer, Shaz Bowman, comes up with a concrete theory She is ridiculed by the rest of her group until a killer murders and mutilates one of their number