We all want to believe in life after death and imagine loved ones looking over us, feel their presence in a draft of air, or the faint essence of a familiar smell. It's what we crave, knowing they wait for us. But Jack isn't waiting - they won't leave him alone. Some might call Jack a troubled soul, at odds with the world, unable to conform. If you saw him in the pub - disheveled and drunk, talking to himself - you'd stay well away, think he was disturbed somehow, crazy. But Jack has a sharp mind and a razor wit. It's not that he doesn't want to live a normal life, he can't. They won't let him.

At the height of the London blitz Dr Lennox Collins,pioneer of the new forensic science,is enlisted by DI Wilkins after prostitute Mary Williams is strangled and a swastika carved on her tongue. Wilkins' chief suspect is shy young Anglo-German Wilfred Ziegler,who found the body but Lennox dismisses this as Ziegler is left-handed and the killer was not.The trail leads to the Metropole club,frequented by Mary,where Lennox's new assistant Molly meets the sinister owner Danny Hastings but then two more women are killed in the same way. A rent boy places closet gay actor Ronald Terry at the scene of the last murder though Terry denies seeing anything. However Lennox and Molly are soon investigating Terry's apparent suicide - which they work out is murder. Lennox takes Hastings' DNA but is attacked by men in gas masks and,when Wilkins is taken off the case after bullying Ziegler into a confession, it looks as if Hastings has corrupt police officers in his pocket. Acting separately Lennox ...

On a Mars colony in the year 2145, an officer in a rebel militia discovers that his sister, who was abducted a dozen years before, is still alive and has been raised as a soldier whose goal is to bring about the destruction of her brother's faction.