Why is bestselling author Tessa Wainwright visiting Oxford again after so many years abroad? Even Vince, her agent and factotum, is in the dark but Conrad Merrivale, a student doing vacation work at the hotel she's staying at, unearths the reason. Conrad, with his taste for hard drugs and Richard Wagner, decides to blackmail Tessa, setting in train a cat and mouse between him and Vince which eventually spirals into violence and death.