Barnes published the novel the year after he married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, to whom he dedicated the book.

[2] It is the first of a four-novel series featuring the title character Duffy, a bisexual private detective and ex-policeman with a 'phobia of ticking watches and a penchant for Tupperware'.

[1] In the quiet Surrey village of West Byfleet two masked men break into Brian McKechnie's house, cut his wife and spit roast his cat.

This leads to blackmail and McKechnie goes to the local police but finds them strangely uninterested and so he hires Duffy to investigate.

The investigator uses his contacts in the seedy Soho underworld to identify those responsible and finds they have links to his ex-colleagues in the police and to his own dismissal from their ranks four years earlier after being set-up for underage homosexual sex.