Mollie Parkinson is a Yorkshire woman who has moved with her partner to Australia and developed a successful career in the New South Wales police where she has risen to the rank of Superintendent. Her success makes her something of a legend in local police circles until she takes on the serial killer investigation into what the press call the Front Door Murders. The apparently motiveless murder of women on their front door steps makes for sensational press headlines and the media repeatedly question the efficiency of the police. Pressure from the press for a solution to the murders leads Mollies team to wrongly implicate a veteran of the Vietnam War, a quiet family man whose story the press trumpet as another example of police failure. Under pressure from her bosses and the media and without any leads Mollie feels compelled to resign from the New South Wales police force.Ultimately she starts a new career as a private investigator in California and develops a successful business based in San Francisco and Los Angeles where many of her clients are Hollywood stars, and we see an example of this in the case of a starlet murdered on the set. Mollie will never rest until she can find the Front Door Murderer and when her Californian business becomes established and successful she returns to Sydney to try again to find the killer. The story moves from Sydney in Australia to Yorkshire and Bath in England, to California and then back to Sydney. A group of friends who think they are commentators on the murder find out they are more involved than they could have imagined.