The series features retired Colonel Richard Harrison, who is said to be based on the author’s own father. Harrison has retreated, after years in the secret service, into what is meant to be a cushy job with the Canterbury Dilapidations Board, spending quiet days tending to his beloved disabled wife.
Fate, though, has other plans for Harrison, which begin with a mysterious death, move on to blackmail in the secretive world of church politics, and explode into a media circus when workmen uncover a tomb that may be the final resting place of Thomas a Becket, the notorious 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.