Innocence To Die For - John Eidinow

London 1939 The onset of the Second World War pitches fledgling barrister Peter Hill headlong into unknown and dangerous territory. Peter’s love for Dinah, an enigmatic, compelling Jewish émigré from the borderlands of Eastern Europe, unwittingly draws him towards the murky world of Soviet espionage and a vicious personal conflict with the Russians and their Whitehall agents. Suddenly he must exchange his habit of sitting back and quietly watching the world go by for that of a ruthless man of action. He must take leave of his comfortable world, its order and decency, to make his way through an unfamiliar landscape of duplicity, treachery and violence. With backgrounds and relationships under intense scrutiny and suspicion, Peter is starkly faced with a choice between joining the army and arrest as a traitor. As a corporal in the East London Rifles, the man only recently a victim of a street attack outside an anti-war protest meeting rediscovers himself as one who can pulverise an East End thug. Peter’s reputation quickly grows, with it promotion after safely bringing back his beleaguered men from France when they miss the Dunkirk evacuation. His abilities and imagination see him sought out by Special Services and eased into the ways of subterfuge and spying. But where has Dinah disappeared to during his soldiering in France? What of her mysterious cousin Elisabeth whom Peter is now sent to fetch from France to England? Opening in London on the eve of war in August 1939 and climaxing on the first night of the blitz in September 1940, John Eidinow’s impressive novel Innocence To Die For is also a story of innocence subverted in the interests of survival, family, and a country under attack from within and without. It paints an unsparing portrait of the fall of France and how a militarily weak, politically uncertain and socially divided Britain faces the threat of invasion by rampant German forces.