A body is dredged up from the bottom of the Clyde, setting Taggart and Jardine off on an investigation which takes them beyond Glasgow into the Scottish Highlands.
A seemingly disturbed young man keeps confessing to murders he clearly didn't commit driving Taggart to distraction as he has to deal with a husband who killed his prostitute wife and a hit-and-run.
A local parliamentary candidate notable for supporting the death penalty and her agent are found half-naked and dead. Taggart suspects the agent's wife and her American boyfriend of being guilty but can't prove it.
On the run after killing a policeman, a trio of robbers get into a car crash and are tended to by a local traveller. They kill her to keep her quiet but unfortunately for them, her death is quickly connected to that of the police officer.
As the robbers begin dying one by one, seemingly victims of the dead woman's curse, Danny, the person who actually stabbed the traveller fortune teller, takes up with Jane Antrobus, a gangster's moll.