Hetty Waintthropp is annoyed at the cards celebrating her sixtieth birthday--they all offer her well wishes for ""joining the club"" of senior citizens and old-age pensioners, even though she's not entitled to a pension.

Determined to make something of herself, Hetty gets a job at the local post office, where she proves her mettle quite quickly by throwing out a troublemaking biker and chasing down a shoplifter.

A desperate Hetty takes Geoffrey up and down the streets and sidewalks of town advertising the detective agency. This proves to be a wise method of business, as they pick up a client: a woman whose estranged son, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, has disappeared from his sheltered housing unit.

As Hetty investigates, she discovers that the woman's son, Reg, has had a hard time being accepted by society, as well as his stepfather, who turns out to have been the person who threw Reg into the streets in the first place.

As it becomes clear that Reg has gone off his medicine, Hetty finds herself in a race against the clock to try and find the man before he hurts himself or others in his delusional state.

Hetty gets mystical as she investigates Maurika Rome, a spiritualist suspected of using séances and blackmail to prey on the savings of the recently widowed. When Hetty goes undercover and invents a late husband she wishes to contact, she begins to wonder if Mrs. Rome isn't the real thing - until a woman claiming to be her "late husband's" illegitimate daughter shows up demanding money. Geoffrey's secret romance with Rome's daughter, Sara, threatens to undermine Hetty's carefully laid trap and nearly causes him to quit the agency.

Hetty looks into a case of bullying when her great nephew is suspended from school, after someone plants an Ecstasy tablet in his blazer.

Hetty represents a neighbour at a creditors' meeting and her agency is asked to find a missing company director and his money.

A reclusive senior is holding up a real estate deal by refusing to leave her condemned apartment building. Hetty is offered a fabulous bribe when she discovers something suspicious about the structure.

Robert's brother Frank comes to stay, and brings Hetty the case of a missing Victorian school ma'am.