Two young Americans meet by chance in a sun-cut village on the island of Crete in 1988, at the end of the cold war and the start of the age of terrorism. Jack is a CIA case officer, weary of his emotionally limited life and agency work. A poet and traveler, Emily has come to the end of a two-year odyssey around the Mediterranean, mourning her mother's death. Jack's most valued and deeply maddening asset is Ali, with a history of training foreign fighters for Osama bin Laden and an avowed double agent. Emily's father, a British banker, Iran hand, and occasional spy who fought in Crete during the Second World War, surprises Emily by bringing to Crete his much younger second wife and their precocious five-year-old daughter. Complications follow. Jack & Emily is a spy novel, love story, and snapshot of a family saga worn about the edges.