The book starts on May 14. Helen Birch has been promoted to Detective Inspector, and it is today when she starts her new job. We discover that Helen has a dark past as her brother Chrlie went missing when he was twenty, and he was never found.
We are also introduced to Moira Summers, who is now studying at the Open University. Moira used to be a nurse, but she has decided to retrain. Moira is a widow, and she has a son, Ryan, who has been morose and difficult since his father died two years ago. Moira walks the city, and she witnesses how a man falls from a building and gets inpaled with a board.
Another character is Ishbel Hodgekiss. Ishbel is waiting for her twenty-year-old daughter, Abigail, who still plays with her school football team, and today was training. When Ishbel is waiting, she sees all the young people and the coach leave, and then she seems to see her daughter get off a bus. After a few minutes, the girl comes from the school, and when Ishbel asks her what took her so long, she says that she had been talking to her coach. Ishbel says that she knows she is lying because she saw the coach leave the premises five minutes ago, and she also tells her about seeing her leave the bus, but Abigail won't say any longer.
Ishbel feels unable to connect with her daughter. Her relationshp with her husband, Aidan, is also in tatters, and she knows that they are together because of Abigail. Ishbel also envies the relationship between Aidan and Abigail. Actually, Aidan told her that Abigail had a boyfriend, Jack, and Ishbel is hurt to discover that her daughter won't bother telling her.
The next day is the key point in the novel. DI Birch receives an urgent call. Shots have been heard in a college, and Helen goes there, but no armed police have been sent yet. What she finds is that Ryan Summers has started shooting and has killed over a dozen of students, and then he has shot himself.
Moira Summers is looking for something in her shed when the police come and told her that her son has killed a dozen students and he is also killed. The woman is taken to the station for questioning. Moira admits that she was looking for the starter guns that her husband, as a coach, had and she knows that Ryan had them. Moira feels terrible for what her son has done, but she swears she had no idea what he was planning to do.
What everybody wants to know is why Ryan did that. The parents of the victims get together and the police give them the information they have. They are all very upset. Abigail is one of the girls who was killed. Actually, she was the first one to be shot, and Aidan is very angry, wanting someone to pay for what they did to his daughter. He and some parents think that Moira Summers must have known about her son's plans, and she needs to be accounted for. Actually, Moira is being threatened, and now that she is back home, two police officers keep watch.
There is a journalist, Grant Lockley, who is stirring the waters even more by insisting that Moira is to blame. He writes incendiary articles, and in the last article he has written about Abigail and her family. He interviewed Jack, Abigail's boyfriend, who was also shot, but survived. In his article Grant reveals that Jack and Abigail sold drugs, and Jack reveals that Ryan never took drugs and he and Abigail laughed at him, saying that he was too weird to get high. In the interview Jack also tells Grant that Abigail had been low because she had discovered that her father had had an affair a few years ago, and Abigail had agreed to keep his secret.
This is a very thought-provoking novel. First, I feel sorry that Moira is blamed for what her son did, and she has to put up with all these threats. The press is often responsible for our opinions, which might be totally biased by what we have led to believe. In this case, it is clear that Ryan has killed all these women, but why? Was he bullied? This is something that Helen Birch intends to discover.
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