She’s a foreign correspondent for a British national newspaper. He’s the scion to an English dukedom. It is 1936, and they’re in Spain, Verity Browne because she is passionately committed to defending the Spanish republic against Franco’s imminent fascist threat and Lord Edward Corinth because she summoned him. She is investigating the killing of a Communist Party worker in the hills outside Madrid, and she desperately needs Edward’s help. The stakes for Verity in this murky murder case surpass the ideological, as the prime suspect—David Griffith-Jones, a senior figure in the Communist Party—also happens to be her lover. Against all odds and his personal inclinations, Edward saves his arch rival for Verity’s affections from a firing squad. This new adventure in David Roberts’s sophisticated mystery series set in the politically turbulent prewar thirties has, however, only just begun. It continues in London, where Edward becomes embroiled in the investigation of a second murder, the victim this time no Communist Party worker but rather a conservative banker. Unlikely though a connection between the two cases may be, Edward does find one. He discovers that both men attended Eton. So, Edward realizes, did another man who has recently died—on safari in Kenya, in what appears to be a shooting accident. An Etonian himself, Edward begins to suspect that more than the destiny of nations is determined on the playing fields of Eton. In their politically awkward, romantically charged alliance, the aristocratic Edward and Communist-sympathizer Verity together pursue the truth in a mystifying case that could endanger both their lives. Read Less