Espionage novels are like a long swim in stormy weather – by turns comforting, slightly terrifying, and a thorough workout. It is, of course, absolute heaven to sit there on your couch with a glass of pinot gris and read about agents double-crossing each other and people getting shot all over the place, while wondering if you can trust a single person who turns up – which is how everyone feels about crime-scene cleaner Judith Kepler. After she’s sent to turn the apartment of a dead woman into a habitable home again, she comes across an envelope from the Yuri Gargarin Children’s Home, a place where Judith herself grew up … if that’s what you call the torturous childhood years she spent there. In the envelope is a file. And on that file is the name ‘Judith Kepler’.

Judith is one of those heroes you come across who seems bigger than the page she’s on: able to deal practically with death, smart enough to find her way to anyone she needs to speak to, dryly cynical, tough as a trainyard full of nails … but humanly, gloriously fallible. The path to her past and why anyone cares about her – especially when no one ever has – plunges her directly into the world of former Stasi members and connects her with a secret, (or, well, three thousand secrets) that some people would do anything to keep. Herrmann’s brilliant, bruising spy thriller is a dangerous tale with bloody consequences that tests a reader’s ability to pay attention – and to know who to believe, in an environment full of lies.

Fiona Hardy