henry wilt tied to a daft job and a domineering wife has just been passed over for promotion yet again ahead of him at the polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers joiners butchers and the like and things are no better at home where his massive wife eva is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm for transcendental meditation yoga or the trampoline but if wilt can do nothing about his job he can do something about his wife in imagination at least and his fantasies grow daily more murderous and more concrete after a peculiarly nasty experience at a party thrown by particularly nasty americans wilt finds himself in several embarrassing positions eva stalks out in stratospheric dudgeon and wilt under the inspiration of gin puts one of his more vindictive fantasies into effect but suspicions are instantly aroused and wilt rapidly achieves an unenviable notoriety in the role of the man helping police with their enquiries or is he exactly helping wilts problem although hes on the other side of the fence is the same as inspector flints where is eva wilt but wilt begins to flourish in the heat of the investigation and as the police stoke the flames of circumstantial evidence wilt deploys all his powers to show that the law cant tell a missing person from a hole in the ground