A mangled body has been found in the garden of a wealthy Newcastle United footballer. It would appear it landed there after being hit by the 8.45PM Intercity train to Edinburgh.

The victim, a Turkish gangster, was dangled from a railway Bridge beforehand. This means it’s a murder case for DCI Theo Vos and his team.

Vos heads up the central division of the Northumbria Police Major Crime Unit. His team of detectives operate from a room nicknamed The Bug House – and they are soon investigating the possibility that the victim was involved in a conspiracy to bring heroin into the UK via Newcastle.

Meanwhile Vos, who lives with his mild-mannered 16-year-old son Alex, has problems of his own. He is being investigated over the death of a well-known Newcastle villain named Jack Peel. Vos denies throwing him off a fire escape, but rumours don’t die as easily.

As the investigation continues, it looks like the late Jack Peel was involved as a middleman between the Turks and a gang from Manchester – and Vos faces the prospect of gang warfare on his turf.

But then DC Kath Ptolemy, the new recruit to the Bug House team, unearths information that brings the inquiry a lot closer to home. So close, in fact, that it ends up with Vos’s own son becoming the target of a crazed killer – and the cool puppet master who seeks revenge on anyone who crosses her.