Peter Maxwell didn't want to attend the GNVQ course. He didn't want to get mixed up in murder either - but perhaps it was all part of death's rich tapestry. And while a disparate gathering of teachers was breaking ice upstairs at the Carnforth Centre, someone else was in the basement - breaking skulls. But what the killer couldn't have foreseen was that one of the victims was an old flame of Maxwell's. So now it was personal. And when 'Mad Max' takes something personally, he doesn't get madder - he gets results.

The derelict house on the edge of the sleepy seaside town was a haven for courting couples, down-and-outs - and someone with altogether more sinister intentions. It was there that they found the corpse of 17-year-old Jenny Hyde. She'd been strangled.

While out collecting some Portuguese laurel for the formidable flower arranger Mrs Dawes, feisty widow Ellie Quicke comes across a dead body - a corpse without an identity. Next day, Mrs Dawes is discovered by Ellie and her grandson, Frank, badly beaten and close to death. Much to Ellie's dismay, the police think shaven-headed Neil, Mrs Dawes' grandson, is responsible, even after a third body comes to light.

Jen Garner tries her best to be ‘wife and mother of the year’. She helps organise school plays and accompanies her husband to company dinners, all with a big smile on her face. But Jen has started to receive strange gifts in the post...first flowers, then a sympathy card. It could just be a joke; that’s what she tells herself. But then the final ‘gift’ arrives, and Jen has to question why somebody is so intent on shattering her life into pieces....

Peter Maxwell is delighted when an old college friend asks him to be the historical adviser on a film being made on the coast near Leighford. Dreams of becoming the next Spielberg soon founder when he discovers that the world of film is pretty much the same as the world of education - full of incompetents and backstabbers. Unfortunately, shooting becomes all too literal when the director takes a musket ball to the head. With one of his students implicated, another off on a jealous rant, and almost everyone out to get everyone else, Maxwell finds telling the truth from fiction to be more difficult than even he could have imagined.