Lindsay her new lover, Sophie are returning to England after three years in California to attend a journalists` Union conference in Sheffield. Lindsay, now teaching journalism in a California university, is researching the role of women in the English Trade Union Movement. The reader is immediately transported back to Blackpool in 1984, and Lindsay`s first experience of trade union conference politics. It`s overwhelming -- the heavy drinking, the casual sex, the abusive confrontations between delegates, the long-winded meetings and speeches -- and the conference ends on a tragic note when one of her close Mends and colleagues is killed in a freak accident. Fast forward to Sheffield, 1993. Lindsay encounters many of her former colleagues, some of them old friends, the others old enemies. One of the latter is Tom Union Jack, now the union leader, a homophobic bear of a man who trades insults with Lindsay at the conference. When he`s found dead early the next morning, having fallen through the window of her hotel room, Lindsay is taken away for questioning by the police. In an effort to clear her name and regain her freedom, Lindsay and Sophie search among hundreds of unruly conventioneers -- uncovering blackmail, corruption, and abuse of power -- for a murderer who may have struck once before.