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A fictional retelling of the 1938 agreement between British PM Chamberlain and Nazi Chancellor Hitler that dismembered Czechoslovakia and delayed the beginning of the war. The story follows two young diplomats, one on Chamberlain's staff, one an anti-Nazi in Berlin. Can they expose Hitler's intentions and set in motion his downfall? Of course not, we know how the story ends.
Still, Harris is an excellent writer and he involves the reader in the characters' lives--we don't know how their stories end. The Gestapo is watching--in the heart of the Nazi regime, any horror is possible.
The standard take on the events leading up to Munich is that Chamberlain, naively or wishfully believed Hitler's lies and so thought the agreement to abandon the Czechs would buy a general peace. Harris does a clever job of crafting an alternative truth: Chamberlain understood Hitler and was well aware of his greed and brutality. But Britain's armed forces were not ready for war (true--after the Great War, everything had stagnated) and the British people were still recovering from the last war (also true.) So Chamberlain's goal is to get what concessions he can--peace for now--and buy time to rearm and prepare.
The problem with this narrative is that Hitler was largely bluffing, and Chamberlain almost certainly knew this. The Wehrmacht was also not prepared for war. It had few panzers and fewer still of the Mark III that could stand up to the Czech Skoda. The number of troops might be sufficient to defeat the Czechs, but was clearly not sufficient to wage war in Czechoslovakia AND simultaneously defend the border with France. If France and Britain honored their obligations to the Czechs, they need send only a boy scout troop with an eviction notice to collapse the Nazi regime. Worse, the Czechs had built strong fortifications in the mountains along the German border--it is clear the Nazis could not have overcome the Czech defenses in the first months while the democracies would still have been dithering. The agreement Chamberlain signed ceded the border areas, with the Czech fortifications, to the Nazis, thus destroying any possibility of future Czech resistance, and allowing Hitler to turn his Wehrmacht toward Poland and France. I think the original narrative of Chamberlain as naïve and wishful better fits the facts.