ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

How would you feel if your elderly mother told you that she had been a wartime espionage agent – and that thirty years later she is still watching and waiting for her past, in the person of her spymaster and former lover, to catch up with her? If she asked you to help her find him before he can find her, would you do so?

When, during the summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin’s mother Sally hands her a large file of papers entitled β€œThe Story of Eva Delectorskaya”, Ruth discovers that her mother’s past is a good deal more involved than she ever suspected.

Following the death of her brother Kolia in 1939, Eva is recruited into the wartime secret service by English spymaster Lucas Romer. She runs a mission for him in Belgium and is then sent to New York to work for British Security Co-Ordination, an organisation which is seeking to influence American public opinion against the Nazis and increase the pressure for the United States to enter the war.

But during her final mission in the desert of New Mexico, something goes badly wrong and Eva finds herself having to kill a man in order to escape with her life. After a long series of half lives under various aliases, Eva meets Sean Gilmartin in post war London and realises that she has finally found her means of escape. But she continues to wonder what exactly happened in New Mexico, and who engineered it? And why?

When her settled existence as an elderly widow in rural Oxfordshire is threatened, Eva knows that she may have to use the power she holds over her wartime master. But she cannot do it alone…

Review by Chris Avery, Ely Library

I found the stories, told in parallel, of Eva during wartime and her daughter thirty years later, completely gripping, although I didn’t know anything about the BSC and what it was trying to achieve in 1940s America, and a few notes about this would have helped my understanding. Eva’s story is tautly and unsentimentally told, contrasting with the cluttered and indulgent Oxford life of her daughter, reflecting the different worlds in which their early adulthood is lived.

The book is emphatically a spy thriller, and its theme – just how well do we know even those people we are closest to? – is not explored in any great depth. But it is a great read, and certainly kept me turning the pages until the very end.