The Secret Place by Tana French

I really loved this novel, and I highly recommend it.

Holly Mackey is a teenager, a boarder at St. Kilda's, a tony girl's prep school in Dublin.  Her dad is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad, and his name is Frank Mackey.  (Readers of Tana French's other mystery novels will remember him; her other novels are In The Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor.)

The novel's story begins when she brings a photo to the police, and specifically, to Detective Stephen Moran.  The photo came from a bulletin board in the top floor hallway of St. Kilda's called The Secret Place.  It's a place where the students can share secrets, anonymously.

A year earlier, a student from the neighboring school for boys, St. Colm's, had been found murdered on the grounds of St. Kilda's.  All the students of both schools were interviewed, but the  police investigation has come to a dead end.

Now, someone has placed a photo of the dead boy on the Secret Place bulletin board, with letters cut out from newspaper or magazine, in the style of a ransom note, which spell out, "I know who killed him."

Detective Stephen Moran's career has also stalled.  He got a break early in his career, permitting him to become the youngest detective in the Cold Cases unit, but he's now been spinning his wheels there for several years; he wants to work for the Murder Squad, but sees no opportunity to get himself noticed.  Then Holly brings him the photo of the murdered boy she's taken down from the Secret Place.

Moran know that there's is one detective on the Murder Squad who doesn't have a partner because her partner recently retired,   He knows that this is his one big chance.  If he can get himself assigned to this case, and he can solve the crime, there's a strong chance he might get promoted to the Murder Squad.  If he can't solve the case, his time in the Cold Cases area will probably stretch out until his retirement.

There's just one more snag.  The detective who worked the case earlier, Conway, is a woman, who's tough, smart, combative and hugely unpopular.  Can he solve the case?  Can he get along with Conway long enough to do so?

This novel is really about teenage girls, and what's unique about this stage of mental and social development.  It's also about the tense relationship between Conway and Moran, and the mind games that they employ as they attempt to winkle the truth out of the teenage girls they're interviewing.

What makes this novel so wonderful are the sharply drawn characters.  This was also true of Faithful Place, the other novel by French that I've read.  And the dialogue.  French has a wonderful talent for capturing dialogue.  French carefully unfolds the details of the plot, Conway and Moran's relationship, and the girls' relationships.

It's a long book, with chapters that alternate telling the story of the girls, and telling the story of how Moran skillfully navigates distrustful Conway, the interrogations, and finally, Frank Mackey.  I tried to read the book in three days, and the first 200 pages just flew by, but I found I just couldn't do it. Expect to spend a week, and give this wonderful book the time it deserves.

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12/7/2018

The "Dublin Murder Squad" novels:
 this

1. In the woods

2. The likeness

3. Faithful Place

4. Broken Harbor

5. The secret place

6. The trespasser

Her latest novel, The Witch Elm (a standalone), came out in October.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the historical fiction novel The Nightingale, a French woman named Vianne Mauriac faces the start of the Second World War with great fear. First, her husband is drafted by the French army. After France falls and is partitioned, a German officer is "billeted" at her family home, meaning that he comes to live with her. Then her sister, who is just 19, leaves to join the Resistance. Vianne manages to survive in a world where civil order increasingly breaks down, food is harder and harder to get, and the oppressive practices of the occupying German forces become more dangerous for civilians.

This book is, in some ways, a departure for Hannah, who's written women's fiction in the past. However, at its heart, The Nightingale is about loss and forgiveness, and about the healing of families torn apart by loss and bereavement.

This book was an easy and very entertaining book to read, even though it's 448 pages.  The sentences are short.  Although the opening of the book, the exposition, initially moves along at a seemingly slow pace, it soons picks up and becomes a very dramatic and suspenseful novel, full of close and too-close calls.  The combination of the suspense of the novel, the heroic subject matter, and the short sentences make it a perfect book group book.

One review I read opined that Hannah does not quite have the style for a subject matter this serious (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristin-hannah/the-nightingale-hannah).  I too, felt a lack when the relationships of the two sisters to the men they loved were explored.  The language and the content seemed similar to that of a romance novel.  But, this issue could be viewed the other way: that by presenting these men-women relationships in a very familiar way, Hannah succeeded in making history accessible to many more readers.

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Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

McClain is the author of The Paris Wife, a fictionalized biography of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.  This book was hugely popular, especially with book groups.  It combined history, bohemian/artistic achievement and glamor, and marriage drama.  I'm not sure what to call what I'm calling "marriage drama."  

Something I read opined that with its publication, McClain succeeded in creating a new genre.  Another example would be Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife, which was also a very popular book group book. Circling the Sun is McClain's follow-up, and it's a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, pioneering female pilot from Kenya. I never read The Paris Wife, but I read more than half of The Aviator's Wife and I think Circling the Sun much more entertaining.

Beryl Markham was English; her father was a racehorse trainer. She suffered an early trauma: when she was very small, her mother moved back to England with her older brother.

In McClain's novel, Markham becomes close to a nearby African tribe, and makes friends with an African boy who becomes her lifelong friend and her partner in her horse training business.  As a child she was a tomboy; she loved to run.  One day, her joy in running led to her being attacked by a lion.

As she reached adulthood, her father became overwhelmed by debts exacerbated by currency fluctuations.  He sold up and moved to Capetown.  Losing the farm was hard for her. Her father offered to take her to Cape Town but strongly suggested she get married instead.  This set in motion a long list of events, including her getting her horse-training license at the tender age of 18, the first woman of any age to do so.

She mingled with the Happy Valley set in Nairobi, the folks who figured in The White Mischief story.  In fact, when the Prince of Wales famously visited Nairobi, she was there with her husband, Mansfield Markham.

I found this novel entertaining, lively, eventful and easy to read.  Many of the chapters were short.  I felt that McClain chose as her subject someone who was a pioneer and someone with an eventful and interesting life. 

However, as I suspected, McClain seems to have bowdlerized her subject.  This bothers me, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  After all, it's an entertainment; it's not history nor does McClain present it as history.  I guess I think that McClain presents Markham as having fewer lovers and more friends than her Wikipedia entry would suggest (I have no independent knowledge of the facts of Markham's life), and I believe that McClain did that to make Markham seem a more admirable character.  To me, that implies that succeeding in a man's world (by which I mean the world of horse racing) and writing West with the Night (a book which Hemingway seems to have greatly admired) are not sufficient to make her an admirable woman.

On the other hand, I admire McClain for having written The Paris Wife which interested so many people.  It's not just that you can't argue with success; it's that ( assume many readers were introduced to characters, places and ideas they would not have otherwise encountered.  And, if all a successful book club is, is an excuse to bring people together, that itself is an achievement and a worthy one.

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Reading now: Circling the Sun by Paula McClain and The Secret Place by Tana French

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I'm about a third of the way into reading Circling the Sun and I'm almost finished with The Secret Place - perhaps 100 more pages.  I'd recommend both books.

Circling the Sun is a fictional biography of Beryl Markham, who wrote West with the Night, a well-regarded book I haven't read.  Perhaps I will now.

And, a friend gave me Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.  I read "The Prelude," and I hope I will find time to read the rest of the book.  I'm reminded that Rebecca Mead already wrote about Eliot as the chronicler of resignation and acceptance when she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the fact that a quote commonly ascribed to Eliot, about starting over, was never uttered by her.

I also started James R. Benn's The Blind Goddess.  This is part of the Billy Benn historical murder mystery series.  I didn't know what to expect, and this book is not the latest book in the series or the first one.  But I felt that, while a reader who had read the other books might enjoy a whole host of associations that I could not, I really felt that it was very engaging from the first pages.  I haven't gotten very far at all; perhaps as far as page 20.

Presenting Pauline: a memoir by Pauline Fraser "as told to" Louise Brass

A war bride who worked in comedy revues and nightclubs before and during the war, as a child, teenager and young adult, and who also worked in Hollywood recounts her memories and her brushes with greatness.

When Pauline was a child, Margaret Thatcher's father owned a grocery down the road from her grandmother's house and she played with Margaret.  As a teenager, she went to school with Judy Garland.  As a film stand-in, she had tea with Glynis Johns.  She had a flirtation with British espionage during the war, before her mother put a stop to it.  She worked in a pantomime produced by a member of the Astor family.

Here's my favorite passage in the book, from pp. 106-107:

One summer evening in 1940, when the war was heating up, my mother and I were home alone, and she was cooking in the kitchen, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke on the radio.  His famous speech was being broadcasted about how we would all fight with anything and everything in our power to stop the aggressors, if they dared to invade our homeland.

His voice came across the airwaves in his heavy, guttural, determined "growl" that had become so familiar to the British people:  "..We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight on the beaches.  We shall fight on the landing grounds.  We shall fight in the field and in the streets.  We shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender!"\

My mother stopped what she was doing, looked at me doubtfully and said, sarcastically, "Oh yer .. oh fine."

But I was really flustered by the possibility.

"What will we do if the Germans invade England?  What are we going to do?" I asked her. "Supposing the Germans do land and they march down Charing Cross Road, and come up here and knock on the door?"

She went to the kitchen counter and pulled out a drawer and took out two sharp knives.  "I've got two knives here, one for you and one for me," she said.  "If they come through that door we get as many as we can."

I felt relieved knowing what I was supposed to do.  I felt better knowing there was a plan, even if it could have ended in a blood bath.  The plan that I was to knife as many Nazis as I can, and get it over with quickly.  Luckily, I didn't have to do that.

The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

This is fiction, but just barely.  It's a somewhat impressionistic group portrait of the women married to scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  This is the lab where the atomic bomb was developed.

J. Francis Oppenheimer makes an appearance here, viewed through wifely eyes.  Much of this novel is concerned with domestic life and the difficulty of making a life in a new place, far from friends and family, while loved ones are serving in the armed forces, often overseas, and while letters are censored, family visits are forbidden, and security concerns govern everything. The wives were often not told where they were going when they set off for New Mexico; while some wives may have known what "the husbands" were working on, it was never discussed (at least not in the pages of this novel).

I am reading this for my book group and I predict it will not be popular with the group.  One member has already said that it doesn't have any plot.  Of course it does.  Victories in Europe and defeats in the Pacific are the rising action; the climax is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The denounement is packing up and going "home," and realizing the Los Alamos has become home and will be missed.  I didn't really enjoy it very much, but I'm sure that that may be in part because I was compelled to read it for my book group. Compulsion sometimes takes the joy out of things that would otherwise be enjoyable, as any of the Los Alamos wives could very easily point out.

The author writes in her acknowledgment that the idea grew out of a comment from an audience member when she presented some research on Los Alamos and the commenter wanted to know about the lives of the wives.  Many of the wives had bachelor's or even advanced degrees in math and the sciences, but they mostly accepted the mores of their day and accepted their "careers" as wives and mothers.  Nesbit portrays the wives as mildly disliking the few women scientists there, who because of their status, got bathtubs.

I thought of the showers there when I was washing off poison ivy oil today.  Water was not reliable; sometimes women would open the tap to get water for coffee and brown muck would come out. They were advised to take something I think may have been called the "Good Citizen Shower," when, to conserve water, they were advised to soap up before getting into the shower - only to find themselves covered with cold, sticky soap when no water came out of the shower head.

The Things We Save by Joanne Zienty

This novel is a self-published debut novel, and it is also the winner of the 2014 Soon-To-Be-Famous Illinois Author Project.

Claire Sokol is the child of first-generation Polish-American immigrants.  Her father is a WWII veteran and a steel worker on the South Side of Chicago.   Her family is a typical baby boom family until tragedy hits her family, leading to a slow unraveling of family ties and a series of traumatic events that rip the family apart and led Claire first to turn her back on her family and to develop a self-protective coldness, fear of intimacy and inability to commit.  Her situation is one that many of us feel; unable to process our childhood losses and to forgive our parents, we turn our concern to our adult lives, aware or unaware of the way those issues shape us and our actions going forward.

I just finished it on Monday, and I really enjoyed it.  I can't quite separate my feelings about the virtues of the novel from my admiration for the author, or the clever way that she used numerous pop culture references to give the reader a sense of "you are there."

There Was A Little Girl by Ed McBain

Matthew Hope is an attorney from Chicago now living in Florida.  Late one night he visits a bar to meet someone; when he walks out the front door of the bar to see if the person's he's waiting to meet is coming, he's shot, twice.

The shooting deprives Hope's brain of oxygen for several minutes, and after surgery he ramains unresponsive.  His private investigator, a man named Warren Chambers, and his partner, Toots Riley, immediately start an investigation to find out who shot Hope, working in tandem with a police detective who's a friend of Hope's.  Their goal is to retrace Hope's steps in the days leading up to the shooting, believing that they will find a motive for the shooting, and that a motive will lead them to the shooter.

Hope had recently had a tough criminal case and had chosen to focus on civil law for a while.  He'd been  working on a real estate deal.  A circus owner who regularly winters in Florida, had recognized that much of his profit is from his midway operation, and had decided that he'd like to buy a large parcel of land in town to use to set up the circus over the winter.

But there's a hitch:  the owner of the parcel is nearly bankrupt and his property is heavily mortgaged. His creditor is expected to litigate the debt, and this would delay or prevent sale of the property to Hope's client.

Meanwhile, Hope investigates the freedom the circus owner may or may not have to make the deal, and meets a remarkable woman.  She is a striking young woman with red hair who, though only about 22, has a thriving business as a wigmaker.  Having inherited her mother's half share of the business when her mother died three years earlier, she is now half owner of the circus.  When Hope talks to her, she insists that her mother's suicide was a murder.

It seems to me that the novel has three parts, each with a different mood that gradually turns darker.  I was sincerely surprised by the turn of the plot in the last third of the novel.

The young woman who owns half the circus, her mother and father, and her friends from her time in the circus (which includes the couple who own the parcel the circus owner wishes to acquire) are a colorful cast of characters.

This novel was published in 1994.  Ed McBain was a pen name of the author Evan Hunter, a prolific novelist who died in 2005.

I don't know why I picked up this novel which I've owned for about a year.  It's coincidence that it's also set in Florida.

Cuba Straits by Randy Wayne White

In Cuba Straits, Doc Ford gets involved with the desperate business of an old acquaintance, General Rivera.  Cuba is not exactly wide open, but Rivera has been making money smuggling ballplayers and cultural artifacts from Cuba into the U.S.  Both activities are illegal, but in baseball-mad Cuba going to the "show" on the mainland is a highly regarded activity.  The theft of cultural and historical artifacts, perhaps not so much.

Ford's old friend, Tomlinson, naturally gets involved and ends up as a baby sitter for a very colorful Cuban baseball player.

Ford knows that Rivera has left out a lot in his account of the trouble that he's in, and he strongly suspects he should not get involved.  After Tomlison sets sails for Cuba, Ford feels he's obligated to go but he decides to turn back -- until he rescues two girls, 11 and 13, from a horrible shipwreck

It's not enough for Ford to save the girls from their piece of raft and the sharks that would like to feast on them; after he hears their story and perceives that they are in danger he feels responsible for their welfare and this development drives the rest of the plot.

Once Ford arrives in Cuba, the action  intensifies in pace and interest.  This was the point at which I became hooked and couldn't wait to find out what would happen next.  It's approximately at this point that a serial killer is introduced and this serial killer reminds me a little of the serial killer in True Detective.  I believe it's a sin to waste a really good idea; you should use it over and over because if it's been good once it will be again at least one more time (and maybe more).

This book has a wonderful cover.  And this author has written a lot of books in this series, featuring marine biologist and ex-CIA guy Marion "Doc" Ford.  I believe this is the 22nd book.  (White has recently started a second series featuring Hannah Smith, expert fishing guide and amateur detective, and I'm happy to report that she makes an appearance here.)

I read a review in which the reviewer seemed to see this book as speculative fiction, a vision (or a version?) of what will happen in Cuba in the near future.  Cuba is close enough to us that I think it is of natural interest to many.  The closeness of Cuba to Key West means that Cuba's history is part of Key West's history, as well.  When I saw the Buena Vista Social Club in the theater, the audience loved it so much that they applauded at the end.

Photographs of Cuba I've seen have shown beautiful colonial architecture and wonderful cars from the 1950's with their sensual and organic shapes.

Cuba is alluring.

For all these reasons I decided to take a chance on this novel.

I've noticed that some readers are reluctant to take a chance on jumping into a series well past the beginning.  They suspect, I think, that they will have missed something important (or, perhaps, they enjoy the serial, the repeated visits with known characters).

I was prepared to have that experience, but I think White handled it well.  (Although as I write this, I find myself wondering:  if White had not told us anything about Ford relationship with his old buddy and dear friend Tomlinson, would we not have been able to infer long history and great loyalty? Perhaps - and it might have been more interesting.  I can't help noticing, however, that some readers like to have all the loose ends wrapped up and to have everything explained.)  As the novel progresses, Tomlinson and Ford act in tandem even though they are in different places and are not communicating - not only do they have a deep loyalty to each other but almost a sixth sense about the other.

What does this book have?  Boats!  Two, and one of them is called No Mas, which I think is a good name.   (No explosions, however, but I am not disappointed.)  Also, guns.  If you like guns, there are at least three here .. no, four, if you count the beretta.  Lots of cool technology on Ford's boat, like an anti-radar cover.  How cool is that?

There's a scene where Tomlinson (if I remember correctly) meets a man in a bar who feels him out and then shows him photographs of Castro taken by his father back in the fifties and sixties.  Sometime recently I saw a news report about Cuba in which I thought the reporter said that Cubans remember the fifties and sixties vividly, and that certainly is conveyed in this scene.

Doc Ford is a marine biologist and so there's quite a bit about turtles.  There's quite a lot about Florida, which was mostly lost on me as I'm not a Florida person.  But I love Carl Hiassen, and he, White and Ed McBain share a love of Florida's flora, fauna and geography which I'm sure  readers enjoy and which I respect.

For me, the pace and narrative of the book really picked up after Doc and Tomlinson arrive in Cuba.

I've just heard that the U.S. and Cuba are going to establish a ferry which will permit you to take your car to Cuba.  Where does the line form?  Do they take dogs, too?

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman

Felix Brewer is a successful bookmaker until he's convicted by the Feds.  Unable to face imprisonment, he leaves his wife, three daughters and a mistress behind.

When his girlfriend, Julie Saxony, disappears ten years later, it's widely assumed that  she's left town to join him.

When her decomposed body is found in a local park, it's obvious that she hasn't left to join her lover. The police work the case, but are unable to close it.

A retired detective, bereft by the loss of his wife to cancer, goes to work as an independent contractor for Baltimore's police department, working cold cases.  He chooses his own hours and chooses his own cases.

One day he opens the Julie Saxony file, and the picture he sees there, of a beautiful blonde woman with breatakingly beautiful blue eyes, makes him choose her for his next cold case investigation.

I really enjoyed this book.  It was certainly suspenseful - it's a murder mystery, after all - but what was really interesting about this novel was Lippman's exploration of the lives, burdens and conflicts of the wife, daughters and mistress left behind.

Her characters are well delineated and they behave in unpredictable ways that seem fresh and original,

This is the rare suspense novel with fully developed characters struggling with real lives.  This is not a Tess Monaghan novel, but she makes an appearance at the end of the story.

I talked to a friend of mine about whether or not this novel was enjoyed by her mystery book group. She said the folks in her mystery book group liked the novel well enough, but that they thought it was not a mystery.  I said,  "How can they say that?  There's a body and there's a detective."  She said, "Well, they said that what the novel was really about was the lives of the women left behind." That's true:  that is what this novel is really about.  It is a very suspenseful novel, however, and I think many mystery readers will still enjoy it,

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Petronella Oortman's father has died, leaving their family broke.  Her mother thinks that marrying Petronella to a rich man will save Petronella from poverty and assure her future.  She writes to all of her contacts, and a man from Amsterdam responds.

He comes to visit Petronella in her small town, and she plays the lute for him.  They marry, he departs, and she leaves some time later to join him in Amsterdam.

She's surprised and disappointed that he's not there to meet her.  She meets instead his sister and his two servants.  She feels unwelcome.

He finally returns home, but he seems never to have any time for her.  He surprises her one day with a very large cabinet, a miniature replica of his house on the Golden Bend in Amsterdam.

She's disappointed by the gift but she eventually resolves to furnish it by writing to a miniaturist advertised in Smit's List, the local list of merchants.  Soon, the miniaturist begins to send her miniatures she has not requested, and she is mystified and fearful about what they may mean.

At the same time, tensions between her husband and his sister seem to rise, and they also make her feel uneasy.

This book has a number of surprises and a supernatural element.  Because it's set in 17th century Amsterdam, I expected "Girl with a Pearl Earring," and that is not this book.

On the back of my copy of The Miniaturist, there is a blurb from the UK newspaper Observer review: "A fabulously gripping read that will appeal to fans of Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch, but Burton is a genuinely new voice with her visceral take on sex, race and class."  Sex, race and class are central to this novel.  It won't surprise you, I'm sure, that I didn't expect that focus on sex, race and class in a novel set in the 17th century.  While that focus reflects the concerns of our own time, I found myself feeling that the novel's voice was authentic rather than a vehicle for exploring the issues of our time.

I found Jessie Burton's writing style surprising:  she regularly used words with which I was not familiar and her prose was often more poetic than concrete.  This did not affect (I don't think, anyway) my ability to understand the story (and there was a lot of plot in this book).

It appears to me that she did a great deal of research; I know little of 17th century Dutch society, or how it may have differed from city to country, etc.  I was under the impression that Vermeer and his family were hidden Catholics and that their Catholicism was an open secret that was tolerated by their neighbors.

I mention this because the neighbors in this novel are not tolerant, and I was surprised.

This novel's conflict is between the private and the public sphere.  At the beginning of the novel, I thought, "This is Rebecca," the novel by Daphne du Maurier.  But, by the end of the novel, I felt that the plot was very different from that novel and that a great deal of focus was on private actions and private values being in conflict with the larger world.

Above all, it was a very suspenseful novel.  I have the feeling that a lot of people will enjoy the suspense, and some people will feel that not all questions have been tidily answered by the end of the novel.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

I was drawn to this book because I'd liked another book by JoJo Moyes, One Plus One, and because I'd seen that it was chosen by a couple of book clubs.  I found that somewhat remarkable, because Me Before You had been portayed in such a way that I thought it was a romance (and certainly there is a romance in the story).

I enjoyed it very much.

Lou is a waitress in her mid-'20's.  She loves her job, but is shattered one day when her boss tells her that he's closing the cafe where she works.  She lives in a small town where job opportunities are limited, and what follows is a series of depressing and unproductive visits to the local employment center.

Reluctantly, she accepts a position as a caregiver to a quadriplegic man.

Her first surprise occurs when she discovers that the man she is to care for, Will Traynor, is only about ten years older than herself.  She also learns quickly that he is  bitter, sarcastic, unfriendly and withdrawn.  She wants to quit the job but is persuaded by her sister, Treena, to stay because Treena's leaving home to return to school and their family will then depend on Lou's income.

Lou perseveres and begins to be able to relate to her charge, and then intensely shocking complicatinos in her work arise.  At the same time, her father loses his job, her boyfriend becomes threatened by her relationship with Will, and Will finally forces her to confront a traumatic episode from her past.

The book's ending is satisfying but it did surprise me.  I now understand this book's popularity with book clubs because I can see that the issues raised here make this a perfect book for a book group: there's plenty to discuss!

Here, as in One Plus One, Moyes reminds us of the class differences of the characters.  She also has quite a bit to say about how society treats the disabled, described recently as the largest, and mostly invisible, minority.

I think part of what I enjoyed the most about the book was the character of Lou.  She's young and naive, but sweet, energetic and passionate. Her family seemed like a family out of a 1950s situation comedy.  Her mother and father, despite their limitations, are steadfastly warm and loyal to their daughters.  This book reminded me of the film "Getting It Right," about a young hairdresser coming of age and finding love.  The sweetness of the story made it feel like a guilty pleasure.

On Saturday morning I went to the library.  I think I probably hadn't been in there since I was at school--quite possibly out of fear that they would remember the Judy Blume I had lost in Year 7, and that clammy, official hand would reach out as I passed through the building's Victorian pillared doors, demanding L3,853 in fines.

Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal

This is an historical fiction mystery, with spy intrigue thrown in - another genre blender.  The title refers to Miss Maggie Hope, a young American woman, just a year out of college, who goes to work at the famous War Rooms, working for Winston Churchill at the start of the Second World War.

I read this book with a book group, and everybody loved it.  I enjoyed it, too.  There's something for everyone .. murder mystery, spy intrigue, false identities, romance, coming of age, family secrets, characters based on historical personages (something I like) - no wonder it's such a crowd pleaser.

Something I admire about this book, which I think contributes greatly to its success, it that the plotting and storytelling is truly suspenseful.