Yorkshire writer Kate finds out her biological clock is ticking down the same day that her husband leaves her. To get over the financial crisis this creates she takes in car-dealer Dave. He's homeless as Kate's husband has moved in with his wife. This leaves the problem of how to get promptly pregnant. Surely not with increasingly interesting Dave. They can't even agree on a baby's name - he thinks Fanny is silly and she finds Elvis, well, inconceivable.
JC is the hero of the Cornish surfing community. Staring thirty hard in the face, he fears that the wave that has carried him through a prolonged adolescence is heading for the rocks as his girlfriend pressures him for commitment and his friends contemplate growing up.
Mother rules the house with an iron hand and has such power over her daughters that they see themselves as becoming old unmarried, maids. Jodie has feelings for the local doctor, a man much older than her, for which her mother strongly disapproves. Beth finds a relationship with a male stripper in Bristol, but sees nothing in the future with Mother around. While both girls would like to be rid of Mother, nothing happens until Jodie sees images of H. R. Armstrong, the man who put the town on the map by dispatching his un-loving wife
When CIA operative Miles Kendig deliberately lets KGB agent Yaskov get away, his boss threatens to retire him. Kendig beats him to it, however, destroying his own records and traveling to Austria where he begins work on a memoir that will expose all his former agency's covert practices. The CIA catches wind of the book and sends other agents after him, initiating a frenetic game of cat and mouse that spans the globe.
