SYNOPSIS

ON A bitterly cold Saturday morning in November 1944, Dr Rudi Graf is supervising the launch of the German army’s devastating new rocket – the V2.

Since his childhood, Rudi has been passionate about rocket science and all that the subject entails; now he is forced to use his learning and passion in the service of the Nazis. The rocket is aimed at London’s Charing Cross.

Four minutes later, 24-year-old WAAF, Kay Connelly, an English intelligence officer, is emerging from bed after a tryst with her married lover, Air Commodore Mike Templeton, when the V2 strikes its target, throwing her to the ground and trapping Mike in the debris and rubble. Kay is posted to Belgium on secondment in a desperate bid to locate the launch sites and neutralise the threat.

Robert Harris’s compelling account of the desperate duel between the men who invented the V2 rockets, and the young women photographic analysts who worked tirelessly to locate and destroy their deadly invention, was inspired by the memoirs of former WAAF Eileen Younghusband.

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