It is just before Christmas on the grim, grey West coast of England and Detective Constable Luke Morton's boring overnight shift is interrupted by the news that a Chief Inspector is coming down from London to lead a murder investigation. Quick to spot a chance to enhance his career prospects he appoints himself the senior local contact.

His first action is to rush home for a change of clothing, including his best suit and newest shoes. That turns out to be a harbinger of things to come: the suit appears to have shrunk in the last six months; the shoes are too tight; and the white shirt he has hastily picked out is in fact a white and black cowboy line-dancing shirt covered with gold braiding.

The Chief Inspector turns up in a garishly painted Studebaker and a serious lack of humour. He pulls up Morton on every localism he utters while himself dropping Cockney rhyming slang all over the place. Not only Morton becomes convinced that Chief Inspector Samson is an inept London reject: the locals in the Angel and Duck hostelry where the murder has been committed dedicate themselves to leading him up the garden path.

According to them the crime was discovered by someone known as Joe the Rescue who is permanently drunk; he is the captain and sole shipmate of the local rescue boat, not to be mistaken for Joe the Drunk who is a sober recovering alcoholic. Amongst the other potential suspects are Panglossian pub-owner Patsy Constantine; his pan-throwing wheelchair-bound wife; inscrutable barmaid Carry; French barmaid and rock-drummer Marie-Anne; Richard Coombes-Neeston, a retired businessman pretending to be a deaf general (also retired); his wife Margaret, a talkative middle-class housewife; Nigel Stokes, an aspiring artist of the modern school, devoted to Carry; Sir Anthony Freechin, a retired civil servant who was either the sharpest brain in the secret service or a proof that the old boy network can get even the biggest dimwit promoted to the top; Bertie Berenson and Philly Mountjohn, two retired ladies who wear purple and carry sharpened objects in their handbags; and Vicar Allan Brayley, a man too vicarish to be true.

After a series of interviews Samson decides they must stay the night to protect some unseen and nebulous evidence.

Not having brought overnight clothes Morton finds himself wandering around the hostelry in the early hours of the morning wearing a hastily bought martial-arts outfit while looking for a nude painting of Carry.

Later he is struck by a frying pan thrown by Mrs Constantine, dragged around the local area in Samson's Studebaker, force-fed a family of five bucket of chicken, hauled around an aerodrome which Samson declares to be suspicious because it looks too normal, perplexed by a freighter standing silently out to sea, and finally for the day sat down to a massive meal including double helpings of the famous local Angel cake.

It is on the morning of the second day of their stay that Samson announces to Morton that he has the solution and will reveal all that midday at the village church.

This is overheard by some of the locals in the pub who hasten to the church to have invisible ring-side seats at the denouement, just in case Samson has discovered something they really do not want revealed.

Morton, in the meanwhile, is dispatched in a rowing boat to row out to the silent freighter and return with its captain.

The clocks reach midday as the solution dawns on him, as well as the realisation that he is halfway out into the cold Atlantic, by himself, in a rowing boat that is slowly taking on seawater.