Gus Freeman is a retired detective inspector who has spent the past three years alone.

Freeman’s wife, Tess, died from a brain aneurysm six months to the day after his retirement. He is still coming to terms with his enforced solitary existence.

His old boss wants Gus to head up a Crime Review Team investigating cold cases. Old witness statements plus fresh clues, and the hunt would be on. But Freeman wonders whether his superiors need his old-style methods. Is the request out of pity, to occupy his mind with fruitless digging into cases that their best young brains failed to crack? Yet he can’t resist the chance to enter the fray for one last hurrah.

In this first case, the team tackles the brutal murder of Daphne Tolliver in June 2008. The sixty-eight-year-old widow was walking her dog, Bobby, in a woodland close to her home. Despite the efforts of detectives at the time, they never identified a single suspect. A reconstruction of Daphne’s last known moments on television five years later yielded nothing. Gus Freeman and his new team appear to have a tough nut to crack for their first case.