Set in 1938 in London and Vienna, a tense and atmospheric thriller told against a backdrop of uncertainty and fear as World War Two threatens.

As war looms over Britain and there is talk of gas masks and blackouts, people are jumpy and anxious. Stella Fry, who's been working in Vienna for a Jewish family, returns home with no job and a broken heart. Looking around for work, she answers an advertisement from a famous mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript typed. She takes on the job but the following morning she is horrified to discover that the writer has suddenly collapsed and died. She is even more shock when, twenty-four hours later, she receives Newman's manuscript and reads the Dedication:

To Stella, spotter of mistakes.

Harry Fox, former Special Branch surveillance operative, now suspended, has his own reasons for being interested in Hubert Newman. He approaches Stella Fry to share his conviction that the writer's death was no accident.

What's more, since she was the last person to see Newman, she could be in danger herself.

Jane Thynne is one of the handful of women novelists to have absorbed the lessons of John le Carré: a spy novel can also be a love story, a quest for institutional integrity and an exploration of inconvenient truths. The female perspective on all this, unsurprisingly, turns out to be worth having . . . for aficionados of the genre, Thynne has pulled off a new kind of spy novel: feminist, literary, morally challenging and thrilling.

The Spectator

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