The Dark Road

Summary

In the velvet dusk of a crumbling empire, a blue-blooded English lieutenant—his lineage etched into moth-eaten portraiture—binds himself to a siren spun from smoke and champagne. While khaki battalions march toward continental slaughter, his bride, Cleo, unfastens the stays of matrimony with the same languid grace she applies to peeling gloves. Her hunger for orchids, motorcars, and mirrored boudoirs becomes a voracious spiral; each lover a rung on an invisible ladder ascending toward the spy whose coded love-notes she wears like pearls against her clavicle. The marital bed, left hollow by absent khaki, mutates into a chessboard where husband and quarry unknowingly share the same queen.

Synopsis

Jim Morrison, an English army officer who comes from a very old and prominent family, marries the ravishingly beautiful but unscrupulous Cleo, who has no qualms about using her sexual allure to get the luxuries she wants but that her husband can't provide. When Jim is sent off to war, Cleo embarks on a series of affairs, one of which results in her becoming the love slave of a German spy--the very spy that her husband has been assigned to track down.