When Darcy runs off on another secret assignment, I am left to figure out how to travel to Italy sans maid and chaperone to help my dear friend Belinda, as she awaits the birth of her baby alone. An opportunity presents itself in a most unexpected way my cousin the queen is in need of a spy to attend a house party in the Italian lake country. The Prince of Wales and the dreadful Mrs. Simpson have been invited, and Her Majesty is anxious to thwart a possible secret wedding.
What luck A chance to see Belinda and please the queen as I seek her permission to relinquish my claim to the throne so I can marry Darcy. Only that's as far as my good fortune takes me. I soon discover that Mummy is attending the villa party and she has her own secret task for me Then, Darcy shows up and tells me that the fate of a world on the brink of war could very well depend on what I overhear at dinner I shouldn t be all that surprised when of one my fellow guests is murdered and my Italian holiday becomes a nightmare...
Sunday September 3rd 1939. At the moment Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcasts to the nation Britain's declaration of war with Germany, a senior Secret Service agent breaks into Maisie Dobbs' flat to await her return. Dr. Francesca Thomas has an urgent assignment for Maisie: to find the killer of a man who escaped occupied Belgium as a boy, some twenty-three years earlier during the Great War.
In a London shadowed by barrage balloons, bomb shelters and the threat of invasion, within days another former Belgian refugee is found murdered. And as Maisie delves deeper into the killings of the dispossessed from the last war," a new kind of refugee an evacuee from London appears in Maisie's life. The little girl billeted at Maisie's home in Kent does not, or cannot, speak, and the authorities do not know who the child belongs to or who might have put her on the Operation Pied Piper evacuee train. They know only that her name is Anna.
As Maisie's search for the killer escalates, the country braces for what is to come. Britain is approaching its gravest hour and Maisie could be nearing a crossroads of her own.
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