From the grime and crime of a Detroit assembly line, through top-secret design studios to executive boardrooms and bedrooms ...here is the heart of the motor metropolis, its men and women, their lives, ambitions, treacheries, successes, disasters and loves...

Arthur Hailey was born in 1920 at Luton, where he attended school, then worked as an office boy and clerk. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined Force and rose through the ranks to become a pilot and Flight Lieutenant. In 1974 he emigrated to Canada successively a real-estate salesman, business-magazine editor and a sales and advertising executive. He became a full-time author in 1956 following the overnight success of his television play 'Flight into Danger' which was performed worldwide, later becoming a novel and a film. In his long career as a novelist he wrote eleven novels which have been published in twenty-seven languages. Arthur Hailey died on November 24, 2004.