It’s 1979, and Owen Linton-House has grown up living his parents’ hopes and dreams. When he is expelled from school, he leaves home in shame, the day before his eighteenth birthday. Living in a squat in Battersea, he rescues an Afghan Hound, becomes addicted to heroin, and ends up smuggling drugs from Amsterdam for a Russian cartel.

When MI6 make him an offer he cannot refuse, Owen starts to live out a real-life spy thriller, caught up in an international drugs network, living and working in Canada and Afghanistan, trying to find the source of the drugs, how they are brought into the country, and who is responsible.

Throughout his adventures, Owen is searching for love, for his own identity, and for a measure of redemption, vowing to return home when he is thirty. It is his sister, Helen, who writes his story.

Rain, Steam and Speed prompts the reader to ponder if we can ever really break free from our pasts, our parents’ expectations, the consequences of our poor choices, or our addictions.