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.