Stephen Powell was enjoying the drama and cruelty of what he was doing and the mental torture he knew he was causing others. He was a bitter, disturbed, and dangerous man who had found a novel way of extorting money from the families of missing teenagers. Semiretired MI6 officer Andrew Ball gets involved when Mandy Gray introduces him to the parents of a missing boy whose body has just been found in a grave near Southampton. Ball discovers identical killings have happened in France and Holland. The search for a serial killer begins as he tries to find the connection between the victim's families. But wealthy Andrew Ball has other problems as he discovers Mandy is not quite what she had seemed when he fell in love with her in Greece.