Season 3

Hooker, still haunted by the murder of his former partner five years previously, is determined to catch an unapprehendable band of bank robbers whose leader matches the description and tactics used by the his partner's killer.

When a young female singer, whom Hooker has got cleaned up on a drug reform programme, is kidnapped, Stacy goes to work undercover as an exotic dancer at the club that they suspect to be a front for a white slavery ring that is dealing in attractive young women.

Responding to a shooting at a cock-fight in China Town, Hooker thinks he catches a glimpse of a face from the past in the crowd. As he investigates the illegal dealing of automatic weapons in the area, the face turns out to be the daughter of a woman who he was once in love with, but had to cut off their relationship after her husband, presumed dead, had turned up alive. But now, the man is involved with the gun dealing, and sees that he has an old score to settle with Hooker.

Hooker and Romano, with Stacy and Corrigan, catch the thief of a freshly stolen car, but in the car's trunk, they find the body of a teenage girl. With the coroner's report revealing that the girl was a heavy cocaine user and had had a recent, crudely-operated abortion, they find themselves uncovering a racket that is getting young girls hooked on drugs and then leading them into making underage porn movies to pay for their addiction.

Hooker is on a date with Lisa Jericho, an infamous ""muck-raking"" reporter, when the restaurant they're in comes under gun-fire. A man whom Lisa had previously done an article on is killed in the shooting, but Hooker begins to theorise that Lisa was in fact the intended target when later her life once again is endangered. Unbeknown to them, the crooked head of a construction company that the reporter is investigating, is determined to see that she isn't around to print an up-coming article revealing his corruption.

When an undercover armed robbery stake-out is bungled, leaving a cop wounded in hospital, Hooker becomes concerned that a veteran cop's heavy drinking was the cause of the stake-out's failure. As he hunts for the armed robbers who are targeting night-clubs, Hooker becomes more and more worried that his fellow officer is an alcoholic, and is not only endangering police operations, but himself and everyone around him.

A diamond thief and his partner trick a young boy and abduct him, in an act to spite and distress the boy's mother, who is the man's former wife. Hooker follows the trail to Mexico, where an eccentric local detective helps him to track down the thief and the missing boy.

Responding to the alert of an armed super-market robbery, Romano and another Officer are wounded when one of the robbers opens fire at them. Romano blames a female Officer on the scene, who he believes to be guilty of cowardice in stopping the shooting, but with contradicting accounts of just what happened in the incident, Hooker angers Romano and several Officers when he announces he is to act as defence for the Officer in the upcoming trial. The move jeopardises both Hooker and Romano's partnership and their friendship, and the fact that the Officer had previously been brought up on a similar charge does not help her case; but was she actually the one to blame on this occasion?

While out for a jog on the beach, Hooker finds the body of a dead young woman in the surf. When the coroner's report is unable to identify the girl, and indications are that she was murdered, Hooker becomes personally concerned in finding the person responsible. An attractive painter and a small book of phone numbers found with the girl are the only leads in the hunt for the killer, but as Hooker investigates the killing, attempts are made on his own life, as the murderer tries to keep him away from unravelling the events behind the girl's death.

When a pimp who has escaped charge on a technicality is shot dead, Hooker and Romano are on the alert for a vigilante group. But when a prostitute who witnessed the killing tells them that the killers were cops, it becomes apparent that two officers from an adjoining Police precinct are taking the law into their own hands.

Hooker, Romano, Stacy and Corrigan are staking out a small-time drug dealer when they find that a major drug supplier is involved – who is being staked out in a Federal investigation. Hooker is ordered to keep well away from anything to do with the Fed operation and any of the smaller dealers which may be involved with the drug ring, something which proves to be difficult and results in Hooker being suspended. But an old flame, who is a Fed agent, is undercover posing as the girlfriend of head of the ring, and Hooker, fearing for her safety, is determined to put the ring out of operation himself - even if it costs him his job.

Despite being undercover dressed as Santa Claus, Hooker is finding it hard to get into the Yuletide cheer faced with his first Christmas away from Fran and the children; Stacy too, is low on Christmas spirit, after splitting up with her boyfriend. The Christmas blues set in even deeper when a drug stakeout doesn't go to plan, allowing the main target to get away. Later, after Stacy witnesses an armed hold-up by a man and woman connected with the wanted dealer, the woman is forced to abandon her young baby at a local church. As they try and get a lead on the offenders, Stacy looks after the young baby, but Hooker, Corrigan and Romano become concerned that she may be coming to attached to it too want to give it back.

Following the bludgeoning to death of a nurse, Hooker and co. investigate the case, the latest in a series of similar murders - a string of killings that Hooker investigated years before that has recently began again, in which the attacker sends a rose to the intended victim prior to the attack. With the aid of a disabled veteran detective and a top psychiatrist, Hooker and the team investigate and find evidence that the murderer, always dressed as an old-fashioned nurse, may actually be a man. But the pattern of the killings suggests that they have less than 48 hours to catch the killer before he / she strikes again.

Hooker, Romano, Stacy and Corrigan are involved in an undercover operation to nail a large cocaine dealing ring, when a highly respected fellow officer is killed, execution-style, by the ring, who are on to him. Tracking down one of the thugs involved, Romano is badly injured by a gun-shot wound, before Hooker captures the goon, who gives the lead of a crooked bail-bondsman who is involved with the dealing. Against the wishes of a DEA, Hooker and Corrigan go undercover as drug dealers, with Stacy posing as one of their carriers, to infiltrate the dangerous ring via the bail-bondsman and catch them in the act.

In pursuit of a trio of diamond thieves, who escape via helicopter, Hooker is devastated when he accidentally shoots a 9-year-old boy, leaving the youngster critical in hospital. Meanwhile, Corrigan is concerned when his steady girlfriend Jill starts acting strangely before abruptly breaking off their relationship. The girl is actually being blackmailed by the trio of robbers; and when her body is found washed up from the ocean, Stacy goes undercover at the aerobics gym where Jill worked to try and get a lead, endangering herself in doing so.

A planned bust on crime lord Frank Dio results in an informant of Corrigan's being shot dead, and Dio facing getting off charge after he manages to discard the gun, but held in custody for 72 hours, giving Hooker time to try and dig up enough evidence to put him behind bars. Following up the lead of Dio's former girlfriend, a prostitute, Hooker promises to put her in protective custody until the hearing and to be given a new identity after if she agrees to testify against Dio. The girl reluctantly agrees to testify, and while Stacy takes care of her young sister, Hooker must go all out to keep her alive, shielding her from the attempts on her life by Dio's men, but a security leak within the force makes keeping the girl's whereabouts a secret impossible.

After a drug bust that nails a drug-importing ring, that leaves a corrupt Officer involved with the ring dead, Hooker gives Stacy the honour of booking the seized heroin in at the precinct. Soon after, 'Mac' Mackenzie, an old fiancé suddenly re-appears on the scene and rekindles his relationship with her. But when the seized heroin is switched for sugar, meaning the Officers have nothing to hold the captured drug dealers on, Stacy is forced to hand in her badge and her gun until a hearing over the incident. Hooker begins to suspect that Mackenzie's re-appearance is rather too coincidental and that he is somehow involved with the drug ring; But with Stacy and Mac planning to get married, can he prove his fears in time?

A worker from the Police precinct is attacked and raped, the latest in a series of rapes and robberies where none of the victims are able to identify their attacker. Investigating, Hooker and co. find that all the victims had prior been visited by a telephone repair man, information which enables them to track down the prime suspect, who ends up being killed as the result of pursuit. But Hooker fears that the dead man was actually the attacker's apprentice and not the actual attacker – a fear that is proven when the attacks continue.

Romano is working undercover as a male stripper at a night-club where the owner is a suspect in a cocaine smuggling ring, when he witnesses his contact being shot dead. The dead girl had an incriminating photo of a key drug importer, but it is stolen by a small time criminal who wants to use it to blackmail his way into the drug operation. Before her death, the girl had sent the negative of the incriminating photo to her sister, a deaf mute; but she is attacked by the same man who stole the photograph from her sister, and has the negative snatched from her. Hooker and Romano investigate the tug-of-war over the incriminating negative as they try and identify the heads of the drug operation and put them out of business.

A renowned psychic is teamed up with Hooker to find the whereabouts of a kidnapped young girl, using visions of the girl's whereabouts that the woman keeps seeing; but even before the pair have met, the she keeps having a recurring dream about Hooker's death. Hooker has little belief in the woman's psychic abilities and how they can help locate the young girl, and is even more sceptical about her visions of his fate; but the more the pair work together, the more the woman's visions become realised - and the closer Hooker's predicted fate looms to come true.

Hooker and Romano are involved in a new neighborhood peace programme designed to reduce tension in an area where two Hispanic gangs are close to declaring all out-war on each other. But the whole programme and peace on the streets is jeopardised when the president of one of the gangs is gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Although the assailants are identified to be wearing the dress code of the victim's rival gang, Hooker suspects that someone else is fuelling the feud to benefit from the sale of fire-arms sold to both sides of the conflict, and must work fast to find the culprits before all-out war erupts between the two gangs.

On night patrol, Hooker and Romano follow the trail of a pair of graffiti vandals to a department store, only to find the store guard dead and themselves unwittingly stumbling onto a gun robbery from the store's sports department. With their patrol car stolen by the graffiti vandals and the store's phones cut, the pair take on the thieves with no back-up, leading to a gun-fight with the trio of robbers which leaves Romano badly wounded by a gun-blast. Both sides trapped in the confines of the department store floor, the battle of wits climaxes with Hooker and the psychotic leader of the robbers trapped together in a store elevator, in a guns-drawn test of will.