In wartime London, even a dinner party can be a battleground. When Captain Graham, keeper of a revolutionary explosive formula, vanishes into thin air, the careful façade of civilized society cracks open to reveal something far more dangerous beneath. Pamela Van Teyl, an American woman caught in the crosscurrents of European conflict, finds herself drawn into a web of espionage where the rules of loyalty have no fixed address. She is not alone: John Lutchester watches the social dynamics of war with a civilian's keen eye, while Captain Richard Holderness understands its attritions all too intimately. As the mystery deepens and the sinister Fischer emerges from the shadows, every conversation becomes a potential betrayal, every handshake a possible trap. E. Phillips Oppenheim, the master of early spy fiction, captures the paranoid pulse of 1918 with Sharpefficient prose. This is a world where the ordinary and the catastrophic share the same table, where a warning notice in a fashionable restaurant carries the weight of life and death. The pawns of the title are moved across a board they cannot fully see, and the player who controls the game remains, until the end, deliciously unknown.
