Ostensibly it is a mystery concerning a six-year-old unsolved kidnapping, one that the 6'7"[HK 1] protagonist Jack Hind had tried to solve at the time.

His marriage falling apart, Hind obsessively follows a treasure hunt of planted clues that lead him around New York and New England, but he finds nothing helpful concerning the kidnapping.

With the Laurel parents Sears and Shirley dead, and no ransom note received, the police effectively closed the case, and told Hind to quit, which he did upon marriage to Sylvia.

Intending to visit Sylvia, his estranged wife living one block away, on a peace mission, he surprises a very tall elderly woman putting a note in his mailbox.

He begins a daily vigil and is eventually awarded when he eavesdrops on two people of Asian descent, one of whom mentions Hershey Laurel.

[HK 3] Hind's friend, Madison "Maddy" Beecher runs the Center for Total Research, a spin-off of S-D housed in the same building complex.

Rather than chase after the woman, he heads to his vestibule to see what note she may have left and is rewarded with "Hooked with a wood, into the forest, it will lead you well beyond the pier—if you're interested.

A thoroughly cogent, marvelous, intricate, even awesome structure, the cathedral in Hind's Kidnap is encountered like a fish coming upon Chartres in the ocean depths.

[Hind's Kidnap] is a novel which is in many ways an unusual and distinguished work of the imagination.It is full of marvels.... All is code in Hind's Kidnap; and deciphered, it's dazzling.The excellent but dumfoundingly prolix result is an often funny, painfully intense psychological detective story filled with Double-Crostics, Nabokovian word games and revelations that tantalizingly obscure as much as they reveal....It requires dedication and patience to follow the trail of Hind's windings and unwindings, though the reader's kidnaped hours are in the end handsomely ransomed.