The Catcher of Halensee

It is the summer of 1947 and Harry Tennant is back in Berlin. A British Intelligence Officer has died in a fall and SIS has asked Harry to step in to liaise with a German Socialist Party member who has been passing information. That's fine with Harry. He is pleased to be working again, even in a city as devastated as Berlin. He has only two small concerns: just why have SIS chosen him, and was the fall that killed his predecessor really an accident? But espionage is an unhurried business. While waiting for his socialist contact to arrange a meeting with a colleague who has something more important to offer, Harry interests himself in a young Jewish survivor of the camps he finds watching the house where he lives. She insists the Nazis stole the property from her family before sending them to the gas chambers. And she has seen the Gestapo officer she holds responsible, even though everyone says he is dead. Then suddenly the espionage business becomes less unhurried. Harry's socialist contact is abducted by the Russians and, in return for helping him to defect, the man's colleague promises Harry something really big. He has the names, he says, of two Soviet agents currently working in the British Foreign Office, and that of another who is at the heart of SIS itself. But, as Harry soon discovers, no one is quite what they claim to be. Not the abducted socialist or the colleague with the offer Harry can't refuse ... nor, it seems, the people Harry is working for. Even the Jewish survivor is carrying a shameful secret she appears no longer able to face.