Special investigator Duke Martin is in London to investigate the authenticity of a rare postage stamp called the Barbados Overplate. Someone is willing to commit murder to get his or her hands on the stamp, which puts a crimp in Duke's efforts to romance every beautiful woman he meets.
Magazine editor Valerie Carr lives in London with her two daughters Jan, aged seventeen, and Poppet, thirteen. When Jan is invited to a party at the Savoy, she meets dashing young Tony Ward Black mad about jive, owner of a Bentley, and supposedly running through a legacy. Attracted to the daring young man, she rejects Mark, a young farmer who is in love with her. But it soon becomes apparent to everyone but Jan that neither Tony's fortune nor even his name may be his own, and her association with him will lead her into delinquency and danger.
Deborah and Charles, young executives at the thriving Pontifex Advertising Agency, are very much in love. Deborah is recognised by her employers as the most brilliant TV executive in the country, while Charles is regarded as 'thoroughly reliable'. But there is one hard-and-fast rule at the agency: the board of directors will not allow any married women on their staff; as soon as a girl marries, she must resign!
An atomic scientist is found floating in a river with a bullet in his back and a radioactive halo around his body. The radioactivity has put him seven-and-a-half seconds ahead of us in time. He teams up with a reporter to stop his evil double from destroying his experiments in artificial tungsten.
An American airbase in Canada provokes resentment from the nearby residents after fallout from nuclear experiments at the base are blamed for a recent spate of disappearances. A captain from the airbase is assigned to investigate, and begins to suspect that an elderly British scientist who lives near the base and conducts research in the field of mind over matter knows more than he is letting on..
