Matt Helm is called out of retirement to stop the evil Big O organization who plan to explode an atomic bomb over Alamagordo, NM, and start WW III.

A young, white school teacher is assigned to Yamacraw Island, an isolated fishing community off the coast of South Carolina, populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.

The story of a retired man who decides to fulfil his life-long ambition of walking from one end of Britain to the other.