Danny Cartwright, along with his fiancee and her brother, go to a bar. The brother is murdered by a lawyer, who—along with his friends (a group which calls themselves The Musketeers and ironically are fans of Alexandre Dumas's works)—frame Danny. In prison, he shares his cell with an Identical Stranger named Nick Moncrieff, who educates him well enough that—after the Nick is killed, Danny is able to impersonate him convincingly. Once out of prison, Danny gets his revenge on the lawyer and his friends, who end up discovering his real identity. Will he succeed in getting true justice this time?
This book has examples of the following tropes:
- Came Back with a Vengeance: Danny gets framed by the antagonists for a murder one of them committed. In prison, he meets a rich Identical Stranger, who becomes his friend. When the latter is murdered, the former takes his place, and when released from prison he takes revenge on the antagonists.
- Dead Person Impersonation: After Nick is murdered, by someone believing him to be Danny, Danny successfully takes Nick's place.
- Faking the Dead: After Nick is murdered, Danny takes Nick's place, pretending that Danny was the one who was murdered.
- Identical Stranger: Danny Cartwright and Sir Nicholas Moncrieff, to the extent that when Nicholas is killed in prison, his body is mistaken for that of Danny — who gets to go free as Nicholas when the latter's sentence finishes shortly after. Danny then uses Nicholas's wealth to revenge himself upon the people who set him up.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: What ultimately convinces the judge in the second trial about the Miscarriage of Justice in the first, is the killer's knowledge of a scar on Danny's knee, which the killer bad also inflicted and was not mentioned even once in any material about the murder.
- Murder by Mistake: Nick is murdered by someone who believes him to be Danny.
- Prison Rape: In the earlier chapters, gang rape is referenced as the usual fate for gay prisoners... usually followed by being ripped limb from limb. One gay character we meet is only spared from this because good barbers are difficult to come by. And one of the guys the main character gets his revenge on for falsely incriminating him — a slightly Camp Gay soap opera actor — implicitly has prison rape to look forward to as part of his karmic comeuppance.
- Sins of Our Fathers: Danny's daughter is rejected from the kindergarten her mother wants her to attend because Danny had (as far as anyone involved with this situation knows) murdered the mother's brother and comitted suicide in prison.
- Whole-Plot Reference: This book is this to The Count of Monte Cristo. This is lampshaded by various characters being admirers of the work of Alexandre Dumas. Archer's not the only British author to have done this; see also Stephen Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls.
