When a dedicated jockey finds that the local politicians are not to be trusted and begins to feel his romance with a beautiful woman slowly slipping away, his last-ditch effort to risk it all for his trusted horse Palomo shows that sometimes animals are truly man's best friend.
Mary Ocky, a beautiful girl from Mondonedo, Ohio, comes to seek the help of the famous PI Philip Marlboro in order to find her boyfriend Macho Jim who went missing three months earlier under obscure circumstances.
The story, told partly in flashback to 1968, concerns a clique of English public schoolboys who bully and humiliate an unpopular younger pupil (Cox) who is 'bad at games'.