Kleo is a book about war, sex, drugs and espionage. It begins in 1930 outside Valladolid in Spain where the immensely rich Kleo lives with her lover Freia. In 1936 Kleo becomes the mistress of a Luftwaffe commander fighting with Franco and the Nationalists and he helps Kleo rescue her nephew Anchises from the Russian NKVD in Republican Spain. A year later Anchises himself is recruited by MI6 and posted to Madrid where the wife of the most powerful German in Spain becomes his mistress. After their affair is discovered he kills two Gestapo agents and flees Spain for Tangier where he becomes...

Anchises Smith is an SIS operative in Palestine (1946; Zionism, opium, gun-running), Malaya (1947; removing Japanese gold from Soviet North Korea), Persia (1948; assassinating communist agents), Korea (1951; recovering a MiG-15) and Indochina (1952; heroin smuggling). Her hair lies black on the shoulders of her dress and she has a white water lily in her hair. And him, her partner, what to make of him? Not, Egyptian, not even close, louche yes, with a slight bulge in his jacket where something weighty lies. His eyes are everywhere but heavy, always coming back to rest on the girl opposite...