In the early hours of 18 October 1996, Police Detective Brent Garner’s (Ande Cunningham) Palmerston North home is set ablaze, following weeks of threatening letters invoking devil worship and satanism, penned by the mysterious ‘Executioner’. Garner narrowly escapes the flames, leaving the tight-knit community to question whether the attack was a targeted assault on police, the work of a satanic group, or something even more bizarre. Based on a true story, this John Laing-directed telefeature follows the police as they launch two parallel investigations, Operation Venus and Operation Mars, into the unsettling attack.