Following the end of the First World War Richard Hannay, the hero of John Buchan's "The Thirty-Nine Steps", "Greenmantle" and "Mr Standfast", has retired to the Cotswolds with his wife and young son. There, news comes to him of three kidnappings and a plot of political and financial magnitude that would shake the world. Hannay abandons his Gloucestershire idyll to counter the threat, and the adventure takes him from the frenetic dance-halls and high society of 1920's London to a gripping climax in the wild Scottish Highlands where he meets his most formidable enemy.