Mention his name and most people will say, 'Who?' while the rest think for a bit and ask if 'he wasn't the one who got involved in all that sleaze back whenever it was . . .'' It's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing between Ivor Tesham, a thirty-three-year-old rising star of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, and Hebe Furnal, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a tedious, passionless marriage. What excitement Hebe lacks at home, however, is amply compensated for by the well-bred and intensely attractive Tesham - an irrepressible womanizer with an appetite for self-advancement. On the eve of Hebe's twenty-eighth birthday, Tesham decides to give her a present to remember: something far more memorable than the costly string of pearls he's already lavished upon her, involving a fashionable new practice known as 'adventure sex'. A man arranges for his unsuspecting but otherwise willing girlfriend to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and delivered to him at a mutually agreed venue . . . But when Hebe's over an hour late he begins to fear that something's gone wrong. When he reads the following day's paper, he learns of the car crash that killed her. Things get worse when Tesham has reason to suspect that the men he hired to stage the abduction might have been involved in something far more sinister, and potentially disastrous for him. Set against the backdrop of IRA bombings, the first Gulf War, and an age of sleazy politics and even sleazier politicians, The Birthday Present is the gripping story of the fall from grace of a man who carries within him all the hypocrisy, greed and self-obession of a troubled era.