When power depends on war, the most dangerous thing is peace.
Midwinter in Pyongyang, Kane walks the streets alone. A frozen city in a frozen war, it's a strange place to call home: silent but for the loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda, with a population that watches his every move. By Christmas he's the only one left in what passes for the British embassy, two offices tucked away in the former East German HQ, along with a Swedish delegation and some NGOs. Under diplomatic cover, he's been tasked with the lightest of espionage: building ties, establishing potential lines of communication, turning a blind eye to the hacking farms, meth labs, and heroin production that feed the gangster-state beneath the Stalinist shell.
It's his most challenging posting yet, so challenging you have to give up everything you know about spying and just walk and sniff the wind. But there's an attraction to being removed from the rest of the world, hiding in the eye of the storm, with its tiny expat community, its guards at the city's edges, its children of the elite and strange distortion of a university. And, working within that university, a woman Kane is falling in love with, even if both know that any hint of romance threatens their lives. Sensations are sharpened in the shadow of the regime. Moments of joy are vivid.
This dystopian idyll is interrupted when Kane's only friend in the city, a Swedish charity worker, is brutally murdered. Kane needs to investigate for his own sake. If they can be targeted anyone can. But why were they? And how does it connect to a strange request the man made during their last encounter, one that leads Kane back to the woman at the university?
