In the scrum, a woman took his arm. ‘Would you give me your protection? This violence frightens me.’ The voice was low and accented. Dark eyes engaged his.

London, late August 1939. Hitler is poised to march into Poland. Peter Hill, a thoughtful, bookish young barrister from an influential family, is strolling through life when he encounters and falls in love with Dinah Altschuler, an enigmatic, compelling Jewish émigré from the borderlands of Eastern Europe.

But Dinah has a secret life. She is the handler for a Soviet spy ring that has penetrated Whitehall. And when she goes on the run from her spymasters the NKVD, they take Peter’s mother hostage, threatening to turn her over to the Nazis if he does not betray Dinah.

With the NKVD intent on protecting its Whitehall spies at any cost, Peter becomes a player in a vicious hidden conflict with the Russians and their British agents, fought out against the panorama of the phoney war, Dunkirk, the fall of France, and the threat of German invasion. He must take leave of his comfortable world, its order and decency, and make his way through an unfamiliar landscape of espionage, duplicity and violence.

By the terrifying climax, Peter stalks his Soviet assassin through the nightmare of the bombing as the Germans target London on the first night of the blitz. He has transformed himself – no longer prey but hunter.