The setting is 1950 in London at the height of the Cold War and Kit Fournier is ostensibly a senior diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, but he is actually CIA bureau chief in London - a spy operating under diplomatic cover. He plies his cynical trade on the spy-infested streets where suspicion turns enemies into friends and friends into enemies. This bleak but familiar literary landscape hosts a volatile cast from MI6, KGB, CIA, and top-secret nuclear researchers who play at espionage and treason by day and dangerous, sometimes fatal, sexual games by night.