Charlotte de la Cour returns to France in the late Spring of 1940 having been recruited as an SOE agent to be embedded in Paris before the expected occupation by Nazi Germany. Her work as a waitress at the Hotel Metropole brings her face to face with many senior German Officers where her lip-reading and language skills are used to learn as much as she can from their unguarded loose talk. But she gets drawn deeper and closer to the growing resistance movement in France where she learns what living on the edge is really like and what price she will pay if she fails.