In the year Peter Maxwell left school, Winston Churchill died and Mary Whitehouse began to clean up TV. Rhodesia broke with Britain, somebody built the Post Office Tower in London and the end of civilisation began when they gave the MBE to the Beatles.
Thirty-seven years on, as his old school closes down, Maxwell attends a reunion of the class of '65 at a swish hotel in the Midlands. But through the endless reminiscences and schoolboy banter, the seething tensions of the school years surface in unlikely ways. All is not as it seems among Maxwell's old chums and at the end of the reunion weekend, a man is dead, hanging from the bell rope of the old school.
When a second violent death occurs, Maxwell finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation. But as he sets out to uncover the secret that has been lurking under his nose all these years, he begins to suspect that he may well be on the murderer's list for killing number three . . .
