Mary is a veteran IRA terrorist, jaded by twelve years of the struggle and nervous that her political passions are fading. Widowed after the killing of the husband she quietly despised, Mary exists in a world where she is perceived by everyone to be in mourning.

She meets Ian, a kindly and opinionated Englishman. After a veiled warning from a mutual friend and a series of misplaced remarks from Ian she begins to suspect he is not what he pretends to be. Her reaction is excitement, it becomes a fantasy, the concept of Romeo and Juliet with a cloak and dagger angle. Her protection is that she does not give him any information that would be useful to a spy.

Ian fits too well, building a link with her shy nine year old son in a way that she feels she has not, and slipping smoothly into her life, filling a gap. Her feelings evolve and she comes to realise with fear how strongly she does not want the relationship to end.

Mary is involved in a succession of IRA activities moving towards an outbreak of attacks on the English forces in Northern Ireland. From the point at which she met Ian, each of these activities are betrayed in certain ways, but she cannot see how Ian could have found out about them. In parallel a sequence of events: an odd gun battle, a frightened policeman, an unbelievable escape; give her a deranged suspicion that there is a secret society out there protecting her.

The book takes no sides on the rights and wrongs in the history of Northern Ireland. Its theme is on the anachronism of the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1980s. In an age where European governments had reached a bland uniformity, the IRA are killing and being killed to swap one for the other. The concept is brutally expressed by Mary’s closest friend, the emotionally abrasive Louise. Mary rejects the concept, but it begins to poison her already weakened motivations and confuses her emotions and priorities towards Ian, making it harder for her to understand the hostile world that surrounds her.