Fox grew up bouncing between the UK and the US. Her father was an international economic adviser, almost always on the move to work with different governments around the world.

A few events, personal and political, create stepping stones on her path to the CIA. Her aunt's suicide and her father's infidelity. Learning about Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman. Seeing Tiananmen Square on TV and the Soviet Union in person. A lecture by Huston Smith and then, serendipitously, a school assignment to learn about Aung San Suu Kyi.

This last propels her, after graduating from high school, to go to Burma (as it was then called) herself, to meet with the resistance and eventually with Aung San Suu Kyi herself. It's a trip that involves a certain amount of danger and deception. And she's doing this on her own, voluntarily, as a teenager.

At Oxford there's an attempt to recruit her to the secret world of intelligence—she doesn't know exactly which agency—but it's not appealing.

She continues to follow her conscience and her hopes for a more peaceful world and While at Oxford she goes to Bosnia to work with children orphaned by way. After Oxford she goes to Georgetown to pursue a conflict and terrorism master's program. And it's there that she's approached by the CIA.

It's a very good fit. She excels at the training, earning the nickname "the velvet hammer", and ascends levels of secrecy and responsibility. She's appalled at the cavalier attitude that some of her superiors have toward human life. When one of them tells her that they'd "rather say they rendered a hundred innocent assholes than tell them we let one fucking terrorist go free" Fox tells her that she's reversing Benjamin Franklin's famous statement, "Better one hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer".

It isn't long before she's deployed to some of the world's most dangerous places where she creates networks with arms dealers and terrorists. While also getting married and having a child!

It's a great book, really well written and with a constantly engaging and gripping story. You don't find passages like this in too many others:

Another very satisfying impulse buy. The first line is "In the glass, I can see the man who's trailing me".