Precipice: A Novel by Robert Harris is a historical fiction novel set in 1914, as WWI was about to change the world. The central characters are Herbert H. Asquith and Venetia Stanley, two British aristocratic figures involved in an affair that could have been ignored had Prime Minister Asquith not been in the habit of littering the English countryside with classified and top-secret telegrams and dispatches. The documents end up at Scotland Yard, where we meet a young police officer tasked with tracking down the security leak in the British government.
