The Economist reporter Jack Elgin, a workaholic, takes his family on a working trip to India, where he is to interview the PM. But their US airplane is hijacked in Limassol (Cyprus) by the unknown August 15 terrorist movement, which ends up in a bloodbath. Jack can save his pre-teen son Andrew, literally in his arms, but his wife and daughter are among the slaughter victims. Western governments seem unwilling to go after the fiends, even hide the identity of a high-profile fatal victim. Although now a single father, Jack uses all his contacts and snooping skill to seek the truth himself. A London-based Serbian free newspaper editor sets him on the trail of four Balkanic killers, but is murdered. Jack decides to exact revenge himself, tipped-off by Sûreté-contact Dugay. Meanwhile US embassy official Davidson and FBI Special Agent Jules Bernard play a key part in the official, MI5-lead investigation, which ends up crossing Jack's path.

Humbert Humbert, a divorced British professor of French literature, travels to small-town America for a teaching position. He allows himself to be swept into a relationship with Charlotte Haze, his widowed and sexually famished landlady, whom he marries in order that he might pursue the woman's 14-year-old flirtatious daughter, Lolita, with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love, but whose affections shall be thwarted by a devious trickster named Clare Quilty.