This wonderful book is the story of an undercover Scotland Yard detective who manages to get inside an anarchist group and gets himself elected as its representative to a European anarchist council. The is made up of seven members, with each code-named for a day of the week. The detective meets with the other members of the council and after a period of conflict discovers that they are all like him and that their leader, Sunday, has had them go after each other rather than the anarchist groups that they lead.

It is clear that there are many symbols and Christian allegory that a reader can explore when reading this book but one has to keep in mind that Chesterton was writing in the aftermath of the Chicago Haymarket Riot, the Greenwich Observatory bombing, and at a time when a fear of bomb throwing anarchists was gripping Europe. Being a very perceptive individual, Chesterton saw through much of the spin in the media and pointed to the source of much of the problem, governments and police forces that used fear and manipulated individuals to exaggerate or manufacture threats in order to divert a critical public from their own failures.

When read from that perspective the novel becomes something more than just beautiful writing and helps the reader understand certain events in the post 9/11 world. Another book that makes very similar points is Joseph Conrad's, The Secret Agent.