This outstanding novel is the story of a girl of 26 who has been crippled in her childhood.

The story tells how Deborah Dainton, convinced of her physical lack of attractiveness for men, becomes gradually persuaded of the reality of one man's love for her; it tells how, warmed by this love, she blossoms into the full self-abnegation of a woman in love - and so moves into a life that leads by small but sinister steps into a full co-operation in a precisely executed and dangerous enterprise - described as it occurs minute by minute in masterly detail.

As in his earlier books, Winston Graham writes here of a crisis in the lives of people for whom character governs destiny. His people, conceived in the round with backgrounds that make them as they are, act out a high drama with all its consequences, material and moral.

This is a book which will tempt the reader to speed on to discover the fate of these people - yet no one will want to miss the texture and the turns of fate that lie along the way.