Peter Riordan is a solitary, obsessive, and methodical man, fixated on meteorological phenomena. When he's offered early retirement from the Manchester bank where he's worked all his life, he decides to visit his brother, Daniel, who lives in Benidorm. Upon arriving in the city, he discovers that his brother has gone missing and that he owned a burlesque club where a mysterious woman named Alex works, who exerts a powerful fascination over him. Peter and Alex attempt to find out what happened to Daniel, with the help of a policewoman obsessed with Sylvia Plath's presence in Benidorm in the 1950s.