Kolia Delectorski is killed in an apparently random act of violence in Paris in 1939, leaving his sister Eva and his father. The Delectorski family had led a peripatetic life, fleeing Russia after the revolution, then to Shanghai, Tokyo, Berlin, and finally Paris in the 30s. After Kolia's funeral a man named Lucas Romer approaches Eva and tells her that Kolia's death was not random, that he was in fact working for Romer as a spy against the Paris fascists, and he had been killed in the line of duty. He recruits Eva to work for him, and so Eva Delectoskaya begins her career as a British spy.
The book is structured as a sequence of cut-aways between Eva's story in the late 30s/early 40s and that of her daughter Ruth in the mid 70s. Her daughter is putatively working on a dissertation for a history Ph.D. at Oxford; in actual fact she is tutoring English to foreign students, raising her young son, and doing nothing towards completing her paper. Ruth knows nothing of her mother's past - believing her mother to be a middle-class Englishwoman named Sally Gilmartin. But on a hot summer afternoon Ruth and her son visit her mother to find her pretending to need a wheelchair, and acting generally peculiar. At the end of the visit 'Sally' gives Ruth an envelope containing a manuscript - the first installment of the life of Eva Delectorskaya.
From that point the two stories run in parallel, always leaving the reader questioning everything that happens in Ruth's life, raising questions about the extent to which Eva's character has been transmitted to Ruth, and adding a sinister undertone to saveral of of Ruth's relationships.
The Eva spy story is gripping, in a low-key English sort of way - think of "The Looking Glass War" or "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold", for example. Not quite as dark as that, but as compelling.
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