Fionn Mac Tubaiste is a university lecturer, whose life is complicated by frustrating women and his part-time job as the field man of the Irish Secret Service, ASR. ASR is run by Malachy Mulligan ("M"), the least civil and least principled Principal Officer in the Civil Service. It has a surprising number of jobs to do, and Fionn is supposed to do them all. His methods are nothing like James Bond's. The period is the early eighties. The world's finest secret service operates in Ireland, as it does everywhere else, but it finds conditions unusually trying. When Fionn comes to the Russians' attention, things rapidly begin to come unstuck.