The Traitor Beside Her by Mary Anna Evans - #BookReview #BlogTour

 

The steel beneath Justine Byrne's shins was gunmetal gray, and the metal touched by her welding torch glowed as orange as her hair. Her ears were full of the shrieks and whines of heavy equipment. In every direction, she was surrounded by oceangoing vessels in various stages of completion and by the skilled people building them. She was working at the Washinton Navy Yard, the oldest shore establishment of the U.S. Navy, and the atmoshere was charged with the urgent need to build ever more ships and send them out to a world at war...

Her target was talking to a man working... on the scaffold. No, "talking" wasn't the right word. He was whispering...

***

Justine Byrne can't trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women's college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers.

Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn't there to decipher German codes—she's there to find a traitor.

Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, a fluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.

The Traitor Beside Her is an intricately plotted WWII espionage novel weaving together mystery, action, friendship, and a hint of romance perfect for fans of The Rose Code and Code Name Helene.

***

This was one of those books that kept me up reading well past my bedtime. It was full of mystery, intrigue and suspense and definitely had the 'just one more chapter' factor.

Set during WWII in Arlington Hall, an intelligence facility in Virginia, the main character, Justine, and her friend, Georgette, are thrust into a world of secrets and spies. It was an excellent plot with just the right amount of twists and turns along the way.

Justine and Georgette were great characters and I enjoy a book that has strong female leads. The characters are well developed and it was interesting to be introduced to the other people who worked at Arlington Hall and trying to anticipate the ending by guessing which of them was the traitor. 

It was not a predictable plot and I did not guess who the titular traitor was. I very much enjoyed reading Justine's thought process as she attempted to ascertain his or her identity. I appreciated her character's intelligence and intuition.

It was an exciting and tense read and I enjoyed the romance aspect as it added a bit of lightness to the story.

There is a previous book which features Justine's character, The Physicit's Daughter, which I did not realise until after I had finished reading. It had no effect of my enjoyment or understanding of this book. However, the author concluded the book with ample opportunity for a sequel. If Ms. Evans does continue with Justine's story, I very much want to read it.

ISBN: 978 1464215582

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Formats:  e-book, audio and paperback

No. of Pages:  368 (paperback)

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About the Author:

Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds degrees in physics and engineering, a background that, as it turns out, is ideal for writing her Justine Byrne series, which began with

Mary Anna’s crime fiction has earned recognition that includes two Oklahoma Book Awards, the Will Rogers Medallion Awards Gold Medal, and the Benjamin Franklin Award, and she co-edited the Edgar-nominated Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie. 

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(e-book and all media provided courtesy of The Coffee Pot Book Club)

(all opinions are my own)

*Disclosure: I only recommend books I would buy myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post contains an affiliate link from which I may earn a small commission.

Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre - #BookReview

 

"On 1 May 1924, a Berlin policeman smashed his rubber truncheon into the back of a sixteen-year-old-girl, and helped to forge a revolutionary.

For several hours, thousands of Berliners had been trooping through the city streets in the May Day parade, the annual celebration of the working classes. Their number included many communists, and a large youth delegation...

At the head of the communist youth group marched a slim girl wearing a worker's cap, two weeks short of her seventeenth birthday. This was Ursula Kuczynski's first street demonstration, and her eyes shone with excitement as she waved her placard and belted out the anthem...'Rise up, rise up for the struggle'... As she strode along and sang, Ursula performed a little dance of pure joy."

In a quiet English village in 1942, an elegant housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted wife and mother-of-three, the woman known to her neighbours as Mrs Burton seemed to epitomize rural British domesticity.

However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, she was racing through the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific intelligence from one of the country's most brilliant nuclear physicists. Secrets that she would transmit to Soviet intelligence headquarters via the radio transmitter she was hiding in her outdoor privy.

Far from a British housewife, Mrs Burton - born Ursula Kuczynski, and codenamed 'Sonya' - was a German Jew, a dedicated communist, a colonel in Russia's Red Army, and a highly trained spy. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria and helping the Soviet Union build the atom bomb, Sonya conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. Her story has never been told - until now.

Agent Sonya is the exhilarating account of one woman's life; a life that encompasses the rise and fall of communism itself, and altered the course of history.

***

This was a very accessible work of non-fiction. I found it very easy to read and I was quickly caught up in Ursula/Sonya's fascinating story. In fact, I eagerly read the whole book in three days as I was so gripped by the story.

The author did a great job in presenting her in her dual role as both spy and mother. From an early point I did wonder how she could perform both satisfactorily. Earlier in the book she says that she would like to have four children who were like Michael, who was her first child. At that specific point I was very puzzled by the incongruity of those two roles. However, in the latter part of the book, it becomes clear that it was her position as a mother that permitted her to hide behind that very domesticity.

She was a remarkable woman who was an effective, successful and high ranking Soviet spy over a period that spanned decades. I did not find her particularly likeable but I was fascinated by her and had to admire her determination to do what she believed was right.

Many people crossed her path over the years and, at times, I felt a little at a loss in remembering who was who. However, there are several photographs included in the book which allowed me to put a face to the names which aided this significantly. I think this is a book that benefits from being read in the physical format as being able to flick backwards and forwards to look at the photos and maps was extremely useful.

Mr Macintyre has clearly done extensive research for this book and he has presented these facts in a chronological and ordered way. It is intelligently written with skill and judgement and the author has ultimately presented readers with an excellent book which I highly recommend.

ISBN: 978 0241408506

Publisher: Penguin

About the Author:

Ben Macintyre is the multimillion-copy bestselling author of books including Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, SAS and The Spy and the Traitor. 

He is a columnist and Associate Editor at The Times, and has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He regularly presents BBC series based on his acclaimed books.