"We're looking for a stranger, six feet tall, wearing boots size 10-1/2, leather gloves and an old blue overcoat stained with blood," Inspector Rigby said. "A man who travels on foot, who was in the area on the night of the murder, taking with him one-and-a-half feet of coaxial cable, a string of beads, and an imitation diamond clip. We're looking for a maniac, a man who kills for pleasure or the price of a meal-and who can fly 50 feet through the air."

John LeCarré's world-famous hero, undercover agent George Smiley, emerges from retirement to solve a baffling, bloody crime. He becomes entangled with a woman as dangerous as she is charming...and a tottering, brilliant man haunted by a perverse secret of his past. Smiley pursues the murderer amid the hollow pomp and ceremony of the Establishment, where a man's fate is decided over tea, and a sentence of death can be passed out with biscuits and sherry.