More focused on his cryptic crossword than responding to his wife, Verity's needs, Joel Brennan rests on his laurels in his marriage and is bored at his sedentary surveillance job at MI5 in 1980s London. After Joel stumbles home unexpectedly to find his wife in bed with another man, he is jettisoned into a world of kidnap, terrorism and violence, catapulting him out of his comfort zone, to establish his purpose, and to regain his hunger for life and his wife.