What can have driven three professional, ordinary men - a surveyor, an accountant and an architect - to the desperate act of suicide? Such is the question facing Chief Inspector James Talbot and journalist Catherine Reed, seeking to find a link to the deaths and a series of desecrations in a local cemetery. Every grave belonged to a child. As Catherine investigates these outrages, her brother discovers that a number of children at the school where he teaches appear to be exhibiting signs of abuse. It would appear that what everyone feared is becoming a reality - a full scale child abuse ring seems to be in operation. But the spectre of child abuse is merely the tip of a terrifying iceberg. As the race to discover the truth becomes increasingly urgent, Catherine and Talbot find that something much darker could be responsible, which threatens not just life but sanity itself.