At the tender age of sixteen, Philip W. Williams III is expelled from boarding school for committing a prank, and on the train home naturally wonders where his life will take him now. It never enters his mind that he will become a world-class marksman and a special agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in postwar Germany, play a key role in the defection of a Soviet officer and then court danger as a courier for the CIA, marry an Austrian ballet dancer of ferocious mien, become a renowned bestselling novelist, and meet the love of his life on a hunting trip to Scotland.

Yet all of this, and a great deal more, awaits him, in a raucous series of adventures across Europe and the United States that will have readers laughing, cheering, and propulsively turning the pages to discover what happens next.