April, 1945. Paris has been liberated, but it is not the city blind veteran Frederick Rowlands remembers from the Great War. Summoned by MI5 agent Iris Barnes, Rowlands is drawn into a hunt for traitors and a key witness is a young woman calling herself Clara Metzner, newly released from Ravensbrück concentration camp.





Rowlands once met Clara in Berlin twelve years earlier- but the horrors she has endured have changed her beyond recognition, and he must confirm who she really is. But then the investigation is derailed by a shocking death, possibly murder, and Rowlands plunges into the dangerous world of Parisian high society, where secrets linger, loyalties blur and a killer waits in the shadows.



Christina Koning has worked as a journalist, reviewing fiction for The Times, and has taught Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London. From 2013 to 2015, she was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She won the Encore Prize in 1999 and was long-listed for the Orange Prize in the same year.