Faith Tilleray asked Manda Scott:

You always write about strong women. Can you tell me more about the strong women in this book?

Manda Scott There are a great many strong women in this book. Ines Picaut is the Captain of police in Orleans who has to solve the assassination at the heart of the story - an old, old woman with an uncertain identity is found dead in a way that reflects back to the second world war.

And so there are also characters in the war: Sophie Destivelle is an assassin, one of the 'equipes de tueurs' mentioned by John Goldsmith in his book, 'The Accidental Agent'. Goldsmith was in the Special Operations Executive and his book is a gold mine of information, some of it entirely unique. Amongst his throwaway nuggets is a paragraph about these 'equipes' whose sole reason for existence was to assassinate men and women who had betrayed the Resistance to the occupying German army.

He says this: "Pierre, the man who betrayed me…had been assassinated by one of the Resistance's teams of trained killers – equipes de tueurs – within three days of my arrest… The killer teams normally did no other form of Resistance work and were therefor above suspicion. Their numbers included harmless-looking, under-developed students and one or two anaemic girls. I got the impression that the weaker thy looked the more deadly they were."

Once in a while, there's an explosion of ideas, and a character arrives more or less fully formed. Sophie was one of these - a nurse who is also an assassin. We follow her through the war and on towards the present day.

One of her counterparts is a woman we come to know as Celine, an English woman of similar age and similar competence, who is trained by the SOE and parachuted into France. They are very, very different women: Sophie is working class French while Celine is an English aristocrat a (moderately) closeted lesbian. But they become friends and their friendship is part of the core dynamic that drives the book forwards.

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