The opening chapters tell of the courtship and marriage of his father and mother: blue-blooded American writer Hubbard Christopher and the Baronesse Hannelore von Beucheler, a daughter of Prussian aristocracy.

Christopher's childhood is spent on the island of Rügen in the Baltic as Weimar Germany gives way to the rise of the Third Reich, and the boy is sent to a Francophone school in Switzerland for his own good.

Ultimately, after a series of inconclusive but icy encounters with the Gestapo, the Christophers in the summer of 1939 determine to quietly flee to Paris, but are intercepted; father and son, as U.S. citizens, are beaten and expelled from the country, but Lori (as she is known) is forced to remain behind as a subject of the Reich.

Comparing the author favorably to British espionage novelist John le Carré, reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The New York Times[2] that McCarry, "a former American intelligence officer who did tours of duty in Europe, Africa, and Asia [has mined] his experiences in The Last Supper… Written in spare, biting prose, [the novel] traverses much of the past century, from Weimar Germany to Burma during World War II, from Vietnam in the '50s and '60s to Mao Zedong's China… McCarry is the genuine article.

In a wide-ranging review of McCarry's fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda of The Washington Post[3] observes that the character of Barnabas (Barney) Wolkowicz, Paul Christopher's dogged mentor in espionage work, "steals the show in The Last Supper.