Carl Foster takes off on a well-deserved weekend break with his family knowing only too well that focus on work has impacted his relationship with his wife, young son, and teenage step-daughter. But after a short but restful break in the journey Carl awakens to find himself tied and bound in an old roadside diner, his family trussed and gagged next to him, and a disparate group of dirty, disheveled, vagrant-like undesirables keeping them captive. Only time will reveal who they are and what they want, but things are not everything they might seem.
The plan: Kidnap your wife's lover. Take him to a remote warehouse. Hurt him a little. Scare him a lot. Keep your hands clean – hire a detective for the dirty work. Simple? There's no such thing as simple.
In 1979 Clive Sinclair, British inventor of the pocket calculator, frustrated by the lack of home investment in his project,the electric car, also opposes former assistant Chris Curry's belief that he can successfully market a micro-chip for a home computer. A parting of the ways sees Curry, in partnership with the Austrian Hermann Hauser and using whizz kid Cambridge students, set up his own, rival firm to Sinclair Radionics, Acorn. Acorn beat Sinclair to a lucrative contract supplying the BBC with machines for a computer series. From here on it is a battle for supremacy to gain the upper hand in the domestic market.