Played out against the background of university life with its corrosive effects on those caught up in its coils, the story is told by one Edward, the gullible brother-in-law to Rex Duval. Duval is an English professor obsessed with a long-dead writer whose biography he cannot bring to completion. Edward and Rex are married to sisters and in this family, including offspring, a host of skeletons refuse to stay in the closet.

Likeable Rex is a reckless libertine and womaniser with a reputation amongst colleagues as an obdurate troublemaker. His wife Milla, a born-again Catholic, takes up with Father O’Rourke and makes it her job to make her husband pay for his sins. Their three daughters all carry their grievances, with varying results. And in the midst of deaths and disappearances, and not infrequent visits by the police, Rex is secretly enamoured of Edward’s wife Gladys and goodness knows what feelings Edward harbours for Rex that he has difficulty acknowledging.

There are few happy endings to all this but the story, told lightly and with sustained humour, gathers speed as the carefully suppressed emotions rise seethingly to the surface while Rex’s obtuseness brings his career to a point of crisis.

Jake Tromp's wife has left him. But he still has guns. He makes do, operating as a private eye from a second-floor office, next to a prostitute's parlour. What else is an old-South African soldier to do in the new country? Tromp chooses his clients unwisely. Like the man who instructs him to kidnap a shady businessman's daughter. Only, is it the right girl whom Tromp and his fumbling assistant Frikkie capture? Soon they're shackled with two kidnapped girls, one of whom is more street-savvy than Tromp and Frikkie put together. The sassy lass not only hits it off with Omo, her Nigerian keeper, she also decides to manage her own kidnapping. From Florida her rich Cuban daddy - believing Fidel Castro to be behind his daughter's disappearance - sends two heavies to find his girl. Soon, Cape Town is crawling with Cubans. Or is it? Tromp, who has been known to try a few tricks of his own, plays the two sides against each other. Until the police get wind of the whole thing Tromp's last stand is a comical romp through the underworld.