The Keeping

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Book Five of the Eleanor & Sophie Vasey series.

The war she inherited is over. The one she started is just beginning.

Eighteen months after a winter house at the end of a birch avenue, Sophie Vasey reads a list of the dead because her mother told her to. A retired signals clerk in Trieste has died of the thing that was always going to kill him, at roughly the hour it was always going to happen, and there is nothing whatever wrong with it. Which is exactly what is wrong with it.

What Sophie uncovers is not a network. There is nobody to arrest, because not one of them has committed an offence. There is nobody to buy, because not one of them was ever sold. Two hundred and forty clever young Europeans were found at twenty-two, had their education paid for by a friend who asked nothing, and were placed — accurately, patiently, one at a time — inside the institutions of four countries.

The man who did it learned the only lesson that mattered. His master spent people. He keeps them. He rings all two hundred and forty of them nine times a year. He knows their children's names. And he is the only opponent Sophie has ever faced who cannot be bought, frightened, exposed, or taken apart — because everything holding him together is true.

To beat him she will have to find the one thing he has never said out loud. And she will have to spend the person she can least afford to lose to do it.

For readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron and Charles Cumming.