Frost has trouble remembering to pay his household bills, and offers to take in a junior colleague, who is a trainee dog handler, and his trainee dog. Frost has to investigate two deaths simultaneously: a homeless teenage girl, Jane Owens, found beaten up and drowned in Denton's river; and that of an environmental health officer, Warren Barber, after a dismembered arm is washed up on the shoreline on the other side of England, near Hull. The first investigation takes him into the world of Denton's homeless; the second leads to the investigation of a local meat processing factory.