Philadelphia Wing arrives back in Oxford from a work related assignment in Madrid to find a series of bizarre messages on her house telephone. Hoping to talk to her uncle Morton Jack in his college rooms, she finds that he has left for a remote area of Mexico, and it is to his colleague Julian Westmoreland that she tells her story. Intrigued, Julian Westmoreland investigates on Phillie’s behalf and discovers that in a few weeks she is to be the subject of a deliberate scheme, orchestrated by Simon Fielding, (someone she barely knows) of press vilification and ridicule…..