A British woman returns to the childhood loss of her German émigré mother in this moody, gloomy novel by the author of The Solitude of Thomas Cave
. Anna is eight years old and living in London in 1961 when her mother dies in a car accident. As children, Anna and her brother, Peter, intuit something suspicious about their mother's death, and together they conclude that their mother must not be dead, and that she must be a Soviet spy. Peter, on holiday from boarding school, teaches Anna about cryptography, while Anna searches out irregularities in the behavior of her mother's former friends. As they spy on their neighbors, their paranoia grows out of hand. Interwoven throughout is a plot in the present day, when Anna, dissatisfied with her understanding of her mother's life and death, digs into her mother's past. Harding is a fine portraitist when it comes to sketching the children, their father and friends, but the shifts between present and past never fully integrate the suggestion of espionage into the otherwise effective story of children coping with loss. (Apr.)
