Having lapsed into alcoholism, Brian is booked into a rehabilitation clinic run by an order of monks. A chance remark by Father Bernard leads Brian to telephone Sandra late at night to tell her that there was an unexplained death in the clinic nine years previously. To prevent Brian obsessively investigating by himself, the team take up the enquiry into the death of a heroin addict, and infiltrate Gerry into the clinic as a compulsive sex addict. Brian's wife Esther discovers the whole team at the clinic, and is furious, but Sandra persuades her that it is the only way to ease the strain on Brian. By the time Gerry's cover has been blown, the team have discovered that the dead man, Robert Smith, probably took to drugs as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, after witnessing or even participating in events in the civil wars which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. They also discover that some of the staff and even the monks at the rehabilitation centre have secrets they wish to conceal or have concealed their origins.

Jack attends the funeral of ex-cop Derek Brooker who went to his grave trying to prove that journalist Peter Edelmann was killed by the American Air Force to stop him exposing an alleged U.F.O. crash, and persuades Sandra to re-open the case. The former Air Base Colonel denies that Peter was ever there, claiming he committed suicide, but local ufologists say that they were present with him and a code, encrypted in a lottery ticket, unlocks his findings. It was a plane crash, the corpses all suspected terrorists illegally abducted by the American government. However the ufologists and another eye-witness, an ex-airman whose café has been set alight by persons unknown, are too frightened to testify and the case remains officially unsolved.

Gerry has a run-in with David Fleeting who he practically accuses of being a pervert before realizing the man is desperately looking for his wife. The only complication is that she is supposed to have died 18 months previously. Fleeting insists that he recently saw her in a crowd and is now convinced that the body of the car crash victim identified by his sister-in-law - he was away on business trip at the time of the accident - was that of someone else. Sandra isn't too keen but agrees on seeking an exhumation. A DNA test reveals the dead woman to be a Turkish immigrant who was reported missing around the same time Fleeting's wife was supposed to have died. As the investigators soon learn, the two cases are connected and not all is as it seems at first glance.

Ex-actress Gloria Gransford draws the team's attention to a clip, posted on the Internet, from a film she made in 1990 called 'Shadow Show', after which the producer Max Stone was stabbed to death and leading lady Eva Roderick disappeared. Director Don Maddox, Gloria's ex-husband, is egotistical and evasive, and the only other surviving crew member from the film - who posted the clip - is found dead. His young boyfriend goes on the run and located Eva, who now has a new identity. A siege situation develops, which Brian defuses.

Five years earlier Dean Scott was found dead of shot-gun wounds and suicide was the verdict. Now ex-hooker Alice Hill tells the team she was at Dean's house at the time and believes he was murdered. Mike Barnes, Dean's shifty partner, rooked his widow Pam and turns out to be an ex-bank robber, who used the loot to start the business. The search switches to the other robbers, one of whom has gone straight and the other - who fought with Dean the night before the death because he was seeing Pam - is under witness protection. The missing loot is found but the fact that Pam and Alice already knew each other complicates the murder theory.

The team meets a girl called Jo, who is heckling Right Wing comedian Ray Harris. Her aunt Sarah Jones and Sarah's partner Daniel disappeared twenty-five years earlier whilst engaged in a campaign against Ray's sexist and racist routines. The pair actually infiltrated an extreme group of Nazi supporters called the Twenty-Fours, which numbered Ray, policeman Frank Paterson and Ricky Hanson who killed Jack's wife. Frank was also undercover,trying, unsuccessfully, to bust Hanson's drug racket but now joins with Sandra to nail Hanson once and for all, with unexpected help from Hanson's son Luke, who has made a shocking discovery about his father. Ricky Hanson is charged with murdering the couple - and, at long last, there is closure for Jack too.

Whilst Strickland's friend Alistair Dudley is entertaining them on his cruiser at a marina, the team see Leanne Sweeting harangue another boat owner Lawrence Fisher. In 2001 a collision between a tug captained by Leanne's father Neville and a cruiser owned by casino boss Grant Milburn collided, killing five people including Milburn. Neville was blamed but Leanne believes Fisher sabotaged Milburn's boat, as they were business rivals. Certainly Fisher profited by the tragedy in business terms. Milburn was going to open another casino and his croupiers were also prostitutes, but the case is altered by the knowledge that Milburn's wife's lover was also on his boat and engaged in a brawl at the crucial moment.

Thirty-three years after the corpse of Dr. Simon Lockhart was found in his butcher's shop at Smithfield the body of Harry Eldridge is discovered - cut into pieces. The doctor used to gamble with Harry and other butchers - now all retired - and Jack discovers from the Lestade brothers, butchers who are Gerry's cousins, that Gerry and other butchers were in the financial clutches of gangster Danny Paye, now in a care home. Brian learns that the doctor performed illegal abortions - anathema to strict Catholic Eldridge - but Sandra gets the biggest shock on finding that she has an illegitimate half-brother, who was adopted by Eldridge's widow, Julia. Unfortunately his DNA is all over Harry's corpse.