"Saturn Over the Water" is one of Mr. Priestley's surprises: it is an exciting, fast-moving novel of adventure that is enlivened and enriched by his humour and superb sense of character, place and atmosphere.
Tim Bedford, an artist in his mid-thirties, is suddenly called to a hospital where his cousin, Isabel Farne, is dying of leukaemia. Isabel begs him to find her husband, Joe, a Cambridge scientist, who has surprisingly given up his job in Peru and vanished without trace. In his last letter to his wife Joe Farne has scribbled a curious jumble of names and symbols. Armed with this apparently meaningless clue, and a sum of money from Isabel, Bedford undertakes to find the missing scientist.
At London dinner party to which he is mysteriously invited, Tim is warned off, and later finds that his studio has been ransacked and his precious piece of paper stolen. Undeterred, he flies off to follow a trail that stretches from New York to South America. But it is only when he arrives at the Arnaldos Institute in Peru, where he falls in love with Rosalia, the beautiful granddaughter of a multi-millionaire, that he begins to suspect that some fantastic world conspiracy is afoot. But to what end? Tim and Rosalia share many breathless adventures before they discover what it is - high up in the mountains of Queensland, Australia.