Yorkshire, 1978. A mother, father and their three year old son are brutally stabbed to death while they sleep. There is no motive. They were a model family. The nation is outraged by the senseless killings. Incredibly, the British public are overwhelmingly in favour of bringing back the death penalty to see justice carried out. Even more incredibly the killer, who is caught red-handed trying to drag the father's body out of the house, manages to hide the three year old's body in a place where the investigators, the police and even their dog teams would never find it. For months all the nation can talk about is the "Kid Killer" but, and this is the most incredible fact of all, not because he cold-bloodedly stabbed to death a three year old, his mother and his father, but because these innocent victims were also his family. The "Kid Killer" was their twelve year old son William.

Street sweeper Joe Fallow is approached by the ailing Grim Reaper who offers to train him as his replacement and become the new 'face of death'. Elsewhere in town, an evil force threatens to merge the worlds of Hell and Earth into one. And only Joe, assisted by an enigmatic supernatural bounter-hunter, can stop it from happening.