Low 2. Bennett has crafted what is intended to be the first in a series of novels which will chart the history of the Cold War, with this tale of a complex Russian plot to make ground in the nuclear arms race. In short, the plot aims to utilise the romantic liaison between a Russian physicist and her lover, Stevens, a nuclear physicist based in Cambridge by blackmailing her into providing her western counterparts with false estimates of Russian development of a nuclear arsenal. The characterisation is good and the plot moves around the European continent, but this reader lost his bearings all too frequently and failed to register more than glacial interest.