On Christmas Eve, Wexford and Burden are called to the Kingsmarkham Hospital. A baby has been stolen from its pram and another baby left behind in its place, and it seems that the mother of the stolen child may also be in danger.

Gwen Robson, a middle-aged housewife who proves to have been a blackmailer, is found garotted in the car park of a suburban shopping mall. Wexford is no sooner on the case than a car bomb goes off and all but kills him, putting him in hospital. This leaves Mike Burden with the task of solving the case, but he goes off on the wrong scent. Wexford's analysis is better, though.

An old man, Sir Mañuel Camarque, dies when he loses his foothold on a dark winter night, slips into a lake and drowns under the ice. It looks like an open-and-shut case. However...Camarque, who was a world-famous flautist, planned to marry Dinah Sternhold, a woman young enough to be his grand-daughter. The banns of the marriage had just been read for the third time in church and Sir Mañuel was nervous. Dinah tells Wexford that Camarque had suspicions that his daughter Natalie (who would inherit his fortune) was not his daughter at all but an impostor. Wexford investigates, and develops a theory of an intruder who pushed the old man into the lake.

Wexford goes on holiday to Corsica and on arriving home receives a call from a man he met there who claims his wife has been kidnapped. Wexford investigates and finds that the missing woman is in fact dead.

John Creevey has recently separated from his wife Jennifer and is still obsessed with her and Peter Mullin, the new man in her life. Many years ago his sister Cherry had been murdered and her fiancé, Mark Simms, now John's best friend, had been the prime suspect. When the police reopen the case and Simms is again under suspicion, John begins to doubt his friend's innocence, until Mark tells him of sordid details about Cherry's promiscuous past - and her relationship with Peter Mullin. When John discovers a series of coded messages hidden beneath a railway bridge, he throws himself into solving them, as a way of taking his mind off Jennifer. He believes that he has uncovered the communications of a gang of terrorists, not realising that it is just schoolboys at rival public sc