Ezra Brown - known to all as 'Slug' - is a 20-year veteran of British intelligence operations. He's also the Service's new Press Officer - a role he doesn't want and doesn't believe in, since he's of the view that spies and journalists mix as well as oil and water. But an act of insubordination abroad - one that resulted in his 13-year-old daughter receiving a life-changing injury - has led to Ezra being benched by the Director of European Operations, a moderniser named Charlie Pomfret who wants to drag the Service into the 21st century.
Charlie spells out Ezra's new role: to educate and inform journalists about the realities of modern intelligence work in a spirit of a cooperation and transparency. But Ezra has other ideas. Ruthless to his core and notorious among colleagues as the last person you should trust with anything, Ezra has decided that he will treat the press corps like any other hostile entity and do everything within his power to bend it to his will.
But things change when a journalist named Agnes Dahl announces that she has evidence of a British bugging operation against the Danes, just days ahead of a crucial UK-EU summit. When Ezra pressures Agnes to kill the story, she drops a bombshell, revealing that she knows the truth behind what happened to his daughter. She'll tell him - in return for Ezra working as her mole inside the Service.
Ezra agrees, somehow walking an impossible tightrope as he discovers the truth about his daughter while keeping his bosses in the dark. As all the strands come together, Ezra realises that the Service he works for has been complicit in some extremely dubious trade-offs, and his mind turns to revenge.
Set in the shadowy no-man's-land occupied by spies and journalists, this is the first in a quartet of novels centred on the character of Ezra Brown and the realities of modern espionage.