John le Carré's world-famous hero, undercover agent George Smiley, emerges from retirement to solve a baffling, bloody crime. He becomes entangled with a woman as dangerous as she is charming, and a tottering, brilliant man haunted by a perverse secret of his past. Smiley pursues the murderer amid the hollow pomp and ceremony of the Establishment, where a man's fate is decided over tea, and a sentence of death can be passed out with biscuits and sherry.