Part love story, part thriller, it's hard to resist turning the pages. -- Belfast Telegraph. On a summer night in 1963, a young American soldier, Lieutenant Marc Gaines, walks into the London bistro where a sweet and shy eighteen-year-old English girl, Marian Barnard, is a waitress. Like the song Strangers In The Night, it is love at first sight for both of them. In Massachusetts, Marc's French mother, Jacqueline Castineau, rich and beautiful, is still obsessed by her years as a young unit commander in the French Resistance against the Nazis, which turned her into a merciless killer. Now Jacqueline has only one love in her life, and it is t her husband whom she views with indifference, but her son Marc, whom she is t willing to lose to some two-bit English waitress. A beautiful and tremendous love story clouded by the flashbacks and consequences of a World War w past, and foreshadowed by the Vietnam War about to start. A fast-paced tale involving vast sums of money, immense power, women both wounded and wounding, and a variety of credible male characters - from the traumatised Vietnam veteran Jimmy Overman to the seedy publisher James Duncan ... an excellent book' IE Book Review.