Hildegart is conceived and educated by her mother Aurora to be the woman of the future, to become one of the most brilliant minds of Spain in the 1930s and one of the European references on female sexuality.
Jo, the mother of seven children, divorces her second husband in order to marry Jake, a successful but promiscuous screenwriter. Though they are physically and emotionally compatible, they are slowly torn apart.
After two British Secret Intelligence Service agents are murdered at the hands of a cryptic neo-Nazi group known as Phoenix, the suave agent Quiller is sent to Berlin to investigate.