Newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison has elbowed her way into the Area Major Incident Pool, or AMIP, an elite team investigating non-domestic murders.
With her new position, she hopes things will the rampant sexism, the snide remarks, the undermining. Then she gets her first a five-year-old cold case of a missing teenager no one else has any interest in investigating, and an assumed suicide Tennison suspects is, in fact, murder.
But as Tennison gathers the crucial evidence to secure arrests, her new colleagues watch like vultures circling prey. And one by one the cases that she has built from the ground up are taken from her - and the glory along with them.