Paralysed from the waist down after a car crash, Julie Hill struggles to get used to her disability and to save her marriage. It looks as if her husband will leave her. Then doctors try a revolutionary treatment which feeds electrical impulses to her leg muscles - allowing her to ride a bicycle once again and so go out for bike rides with her family. Her marriage survives and she and her husband end up closer together than before.

Lady Hugh, the intolerant Bible-fanatic president of Oxford's Mayfield college, turns against anything gay. Shortly after the popular a nd decent student Will McEwan shoots himself in the head in St. Mark's church after waving a revolver at Reverend Francis King, who is himself found tortuously murdered by a hot poker in the head the next day. The link between both victims is the Garden, a pious society offering Christian answers to youngsters' contemporary question -- its emblem being a Phoenix, which both Will's suicide note that says, "I lost my way between Gethsemane and Calvary," and a message on King's door hat says, "Life born of fire," refer to. Lewis's partner, Detective Sergeant James Hathaway, was a friend of Will's in school and again at university, but his brutally gay-bashing father Henry McEwan apparently repudiates Will posthumously finding out...