Taken from the book by John le Carré, George Smiley rallies to the aid of his former intelligence colleague, Ailsa Brimley, to investigate a mysterious letter from a junior masters wife at Carne School, a boys school. When Smiley goes to Carne to investigate, he finds the junior masters wife brutualy murdered, with her husband as one of the suspects. Smiley begins to scratch at the surface of the closed-knit society of Carne, and soon begins to find that things are not as they seem. Secret societies, sexual abuse, and a mysterious boy, Timothy Perkins, who is either another suspect, witness, or victim.