'I suppose it would be possible to tail a fellow Englishman for a month about the South of France. It wouldn't be easy, operating singly. And presumably it wouldn't do for him to know?'

'He's unaware that I'm in touch with you, and if he does catch you on his heels, he'll undoubtedly explode. If that happens, explode back at him and wait for him to simmer down. Actually, I think you and he might get on reasonably well.'

When a retired English colonel plans a walking tour in the South of France, his wife engages Kenworthy to mind him. Is this an unpardonable breach of personal privacy? And is Colonel Neville's purpose really sinister-as it sometimes appears? Kenworthy finds him in turn eccentric, domineering, secretive and, on occasion, bumblingly inefficient; then he loses him. Murder follows, and Kenworthy, helped by Monique Colin, a delectable young private eye from an agency in Nice, traces a trail back to the wartime Resistance: a world of pride, passions, jealousies and shame, in which the harshness of reality was sometimes more powerful than the heroism.