Reluctantly posing as a pacifist, Richard Hannay infiltrates an anti-war league to capture an
unimpeachable German spy. Mr. Standfast, the second in the series of five novels following Hannay's
exploits, picking up after Hannay has returned home from the Somme, is working for the War Office under an
assumed name, a brigadier still under forty taken out of the military for a second round in the spy game.

The only instructions he's given: take up his old identity as a mining engineer from South Africa, and pose as
a staunch pacifist. As Hannay himself put it: "to go into Germany as an anti-British Afrikander was a stoutish
adventure, but to lounge about at home talking rot was a very different-sized job."

Richard Hannay, the South African mining engineer and war hero, again takes readers along with him for the
twists and turns of espionage during the turbulent years of World War I.