John Preston é um agente britânico com a tarefa de impedir que os russos detonem uma bomba nuclear ao lado de uma base americana no Reino Unido. Os russos esperam que isso quebre o "relacionamento especial" entre UK e USA.
"It never done a woman any harm to be at the end o' a back-hander." In a society where drunkenness and battered wives are treated as 'normal', Jean McLeod attempts to hold her family together. But after a particularly severe beating she decides to fight back.
After a chance meeting and an indiscreet conversation, childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley become involved in a convoluted intrigue led by a mysterious man known simply as Mr. Brown.
"Ploughman! Nobody calls you that. You're a has-been. Your head and heart went into a museum wi' that lot you keep in there. Face it: you're redundant." Ploughman Duncan Brewster faces redundancy in late life.
'Ah walked 15 miles tae Greenock tae get a job and ah'm no' going hame without wan. Ah've got tae stay. Ah've got tae show folk what it's like tae live by somethin' ye believe in.'
When Dexter Munro and his new wife Juliet get married, they decide to escape Juliet's meddling father by buying a rundown cottage and doing it up themselves. But when the cottage proves to be more ramshackle than they thought, and the scale of the repairs needed far out of their budget, the newlyweds are forced into calling on Juliet's father after all. Before long he's employed incompetent builder Josh Wicks, and the situation goes from bad to worse.
