Luke Jennings

In a remand centre in the Ural Mountains, Oxana Vorontsova awaits trial for triple murder. Not what you’d expect from a star linguistics student. Half a world away, her potential has been noted. Sprung from prison and trained in the dark arts of assassination, she’s reborn as the beautiful, lethal Villanelle. The price of her luxurious new life: to eliminate targets assigned to her by a shadowy group of all-powerful businessmen.

As Villanelle returns to face her childhood demons and the Russian winter, Eve finds herself on the run from The Twelve, who want her dead. As the action moves between London and St Petersburg, and Eve and Villanelle finally admit their mutual erotic obsession, the chess game approaches its lethal, unforgettable conclusion.

In a hotel room in Venice, where she's just completed a routine assassination, Villanelle receives a late-night call.

Eve Polastri has discovered that a senior MI5 officer is in the pay of the Twelve, and is about to debrief him. As Eve interrogates her subject, desperately trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, Villanelle moves in for the kill.

The duel between the two women intensifies, as does their mutual obsession, and when the action moves from the high passes of the Tyrol to the heart of Russia, Eve finally begins to unwrap the enigma of her adversary's true identity.