John Russell, an English journalist, had always been a reluctant spy. It’s a dangerous life --- especially when you are tasked with being a double agent for Soviet and American intelligence. But it’s been years since Russell was finally able to extricate himself from his life of espionage --- through a shady deal with a high-ranking Soviet official. Now it’s 1953, and Russell and his family live a life of relative comfort in Los Angeles. Feeling somewhat adrift, Russell has just begun work on a book investigating American firms that continued doing business with Germany during Nazi occupation. Then he notices someone is tailing him around Los Angeles. Has someone not taken kindly to his research? Or could it be that the deal he struck all those years ago has left him with unfinished business?

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin is set ablaze. It’s just a month after Hitler’s inauguration as Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis use the torching to justify a campaign of terror against their political opponents. John Russell’s recent separation from his wife threatens his right to reside in Germany and any meaningful relationship with his six-year-old son, Paul. He has just secured work as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper, and the crimes that he has to report --- the gruesome murder of a rent boy, the hit-and-run death of a professional genealogist, the suspicious disappearance of a Nazi-supporting celebrity fortune teller --- are increasingly entangled in the wider nightmare engulfing Germany.

In April 1938, Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow’s son, discovers the carefully hidden diary that the boarder had kept during his stay. What Walter finds is a chronicle of one of the most tumultuous years in German history, narrated by a secret agent on a deadly mission. Josef Hofmann was not the returned Argentinian immigrant he’d said he was --- he was a communist spy under Moscow’s command trying to reconnect with remaining members of Germany’s suppressed communist party. But as he grew close to the Gersdorffs, accidentally stepping into the role of the father Walter never had, Hofmann began to wish for another kind of hope in his life.

Ex–Secret Service spy Jack McColl is in prison serving time for assaulting a cop. McColl has been embittered by the Great War; he feels betrayed by the country that had sent so many young men to die needlessly. He’s also heartbroken. The love of his life, radical journalist Caitlin Hanley, parted ways with him three years earlier so she could offer her services to the Communist revolution in Moscow. Then his former Secret Service boss offers McColl the chance to escape his jail sentence if he takes a dangerous and unofficial assignment in Russia, where McColl is already a wanted man. Little does he know that his mission will throw him back into Caitlin’s life --- or that her husband will be one of the men he is trying to hunt down.

Winter 1917: As a generation of Europe’s young men perish on the Eastern and Western fronts, British spy Jack McColl is assigned a sabotage mission deep in Central Asia, where German influence is strong. Meanwhile, the woman he loves, Irish-American radical journalist Caitlin Hanley, is in Bolshevik Russia, thrilled to have the chance to cover the Revolution. But four years of bloody war have taken their toll on all of Europe. Up until now, Jack and Caitlin have managed to set aside their allegiances and stay faithful to each other, but the stakes of their affair have risen too high. Can a revolutionary love a spy? And if she does, will it cost one of them their life?

Jack McColl has always hoped to make a job for himself as a spy. As his sales calls take him from city to great city, he moonlights collecting intelligence for His Majesty's Navy. With a geopolitical catastrophe brewing, he soon realizes what his aspirations may cost him. Meanwhile, an American suffragette journalist has wiled her way deep into his affections, and it’s not long before he realizes that her family might be embroiled in the Irish Republican movement his bosses are fighting against.

Jack McColl, a spy for His Majesty’s Secret Service, is stationed in India, charged with defending the Empire against Bengali terrorists and their German allies. In England, meanwhile, suffragette journalist Caitlin Hanley begins the business of rebuilding her life after the execution of her brother --- an IRA sympathizer whose terrorist plot was foiled by Caitlin’s own ex-lover, the very same Jack McColl. The threat of a Rising in Dublin alarms McColl’s bosses as much as it dazzles Caitlin. If another Irish plot brings them back together, will it be as enemies or lovers?

John Russell is tracked down by Soviet agent Shchepkin, who helped Russell survive war, to repay that war-time debt. He has no choice, but to be sent back to Germany and take up a cover as an investigative journalist and hand over US intelligence reports on the German Communist Party. Will John every be able to leave the past behind?