George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing...

An insurance man and a suburban wife almost achieve the perfect crime when they conspire to trick her husband into signing a policy that pays double for accidental death, then push him from a train.

A small-town, naive Midwestern insurance agent must represent his company at a regional insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where his mind is blown by the big city experience.

Follows the lives of a 1950s middle-class Ohio family--an insurance salesman, his common-sense wife, and their three children

"A film noire about an insurance salesman who gets himself in a messy situation through his involvement with another woman." -- Cover.