A gruesome discovery suggests something horrible has happened to two teenaged boys, Ben Schofield and Danny Wilkinson, who have both gone missing from their homes a year apart. And why did they both disappear in September during the night before the new school year starts? For the boys' families it's a living hell, and lives change forever. The boys' friends are devastated. Thank God for their friend, Adam Preston: he can get the stuff to make them feel better for a while. As the year moves along, what Adam doesn't tell anybody is that he thinks someone is watching him. Is someone setting their sights on a new target for next September? But who and why? The story spans over thirty years, and is set in the gritty Northern City of Bradford. There is the warmth of family love and friendships, and the underbelly of crime with its drug dealings, terrors of child abuse and horrors of murder and violence. There are the people who lead ordinary lives, who work hard for themselves and for others, and there are those who are wracked with anger, hatred and indifference. And there are those who pay the highest price for our ultimate failure to protect our young.