Inspector Hal Challis has been summoned to his boyhood home, Mawson's Bluff in the Australian Outback, where his father is dying. There his past comes back to haunt him . . . and endanger his life. Meanwhile, a serial pedophile is on the loose on the Mornington Peninsula, and Sergeant Ellen Destry, who is left to head up the area's Crime Investigation Unit, must find a little girl who was abducted from the fairgrounds at the annual Waterloo Show before it is too late.