Bill Wiley has seen action - some of it open, much of it covert - in many of the world's most dangerous places. In his country's name, he has brought lives to an end, rarely expecting to understand the reasoning behind his orders.
But when he is called back from Northern Ireland for his latest assignment, his growing realisation of the toll the years have taken is finally crystallised.
For the man his paymasters want him to kill is ninety-three years old, the sole inmate of the most heavily guarded prison in the world. They call him Rudolph Hess. At first, Wiley refuses. Not only through revulsion, but through a sketchy awareness that the grotesquely simple order hides a deeper mystery.
Helped by Oxford historian Jane Heywood and her uncle - a wartime spy who was involved in the mysterious flights of 1941 - he unravels truths that many men have died for.
Jan Needle's uncompromising new novel, which draws on much hitherto unknown material, is a thriller that ranges over five decades of history to confront the unpalatable truth behind what has been called the last great mystery of World War II. Its themes of love and corruption embrace the killers of the prisoner in Spandau and their wartime counterparts - mean and women, all, who had to do the bidding of their masters.
