After being fired from the Gardai, Jack Taylor takes a new job as a private investigator.

Jack Taylor returns to his beloved Galway and is soon investigating a brutal murder.

Galway private investigator Jack Taylor is hired by the daughter of a former inmate of the infamous Magdalene Laundries to find the identity of a former nun, known only as Lucifer, who was notorious for taking pleasure in torturing the girls.

Seven months after his mother's stroke, and continuing on his path of sobriety and healthier living, Jack is called on to investigate the death of a female university student, who falls from a roof while dressed in theatre costume. A ring of paper around her wrist contains an apparent suicide note written in her blood, and Gardai assume the death to be drug related.

Jack investigates the death of a priest who has been beheaded, and discovers the cleric abused two boys several years earlier. As more secrets from the church are revealed, Jack drifts back into his old habits, and discovers more of his own demons, along with the horrendous consequences the victims of the priest's earlier abuse are still enduring.

When the police make no headway in the shooting death of a woman, Taylor volunteers his services to her grieving family. He believes the woman's 11-year-old daughter saw the killer and may now be in danger. While a feud rages within her community, Taylor has to protect the girl and help her recall the events of her mother's murder.