A Veritable Quandry - Edward C Distel

Captain Thomas Calder didn’t die in France in 1944 - but the man he became there did.

Ten years into a marriage built on discretion, Calder has a quiet postwar career on the State Department’s Western Europe Desk, a wife, Liz, who reads him better than his own case officers do, and a wartime report that has held together for a decade because no one had reason to pull the thread. Then Isabel Montcada - a woman Calder buried in his memory along with a version of the war he never wrote down - walks into a Washington reception very much alive, and settles, uninvited, into the space between Calder and his wife.

What follows isn’t betrayal in any single act. It’s the slow collapse of a story two people have been telling themselves since a firefight in southern France - a story that starts coming apart the moment someone else asks the right question. As a wartime inquiry, a Soviet investigation, and a Falangist network converge on the one name they all share, Calder has to decide what he’s protecting: the truth, his career, Isabel, or Liz. He’s fast running out of ways to keep those four things separate.

A Veritable Quandary is a Cold War espionage novel about the lies a marriage can absorb, and the ones it can’t.