Irina Kusak’s recently divorced husband, Jiri Hrádek, is a high-ranking official in the Czechoslovakian secret police: cruel, ambitious, utterly ruthless. So when he turns a blind eye to her defection to the west, she is uneasy. Aided in her escape by a group of friends, including David Mennery, an American with whom she once had a passionate affair, Irina begins to feel herself truly free. But soon their journey becomes a nightmare. It becomes clear that Hrádek only allowed Irina to defect in order to bait a trap for her father, a world-famous author living in secrecy in the west, but when she refuses to lead Hrádek to his quarry, Irina herself becomes his prime target.
As Hrádek closes in and Irina’s life hangs in the balance, David Mennery is drawn into a desperate fight to protect her and finds himself once more falling deeply in love…
Helen MacInnes was a Scottish-American author of espionage novels. She graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1928 with a degree in French and German. A librarian, she married Professor Gilbert Highet in 1932 and moved with her husband to New York in 1937 so he could teach classics at Columbia University. She wrote her first novel, Above Suspicion, in 1939. She wrote many bestselling suspense novels and became an American citizen in 1951.
