John Putnam Thatcher of the Sloan Guaranty Trust flies to Japan to head off a possible takeover. Meanwhile, a US electrics giant is planning an assault on the lucrative, and almost impregnable, Japanese market. The company's president arrives in Tokyo at the same time as Thatcher to announce a distribution deal with the Yanezawa Trading Corporation. But the decorous negotiations are interrupted... by murder.

Tangled in an ever-widening web of unscrupulous business practices, corruption in high places and violence, Thatcher must travel to England before a conundrum can be solved... and the killer found.