A story of espionage and crime from the celebrated English novelist. The hero is a middle-aged mental patient newly released from the asylum he had been confined to after killing his terminally ill wife several years before. In London, in the early days of the Second World War, he stumbles into a spy ring and soon finds himself marked for assassination. Written with Greene`s distinctive attention to psychology and his fascination with moral collapse and despair, it presents a haunting portrait of a man trapped in a world of madness and terror.