SPITFIRE

Post-Blitz London has no place for a former Resistance fighter—until a brand-new intelligence network puts her skills to use at the dawn of the Cold War.

Lancashire girl Olivia Nash volunteered to do her part for the war effort in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, but her superiors soon spotted that French was her mother tongue and pluck was her middle name. Livy trained in lock-picking and marksmanship, then landed in Vichy France to support the Resistance. But now, with the war over and her comrade and lover, Peter Scobee, dead, Livy is stuck proofreading at a third-rate newspaper and drinking too much cheap vodka until her talents are requested by none other than a highly polished gentleman named Ian Fleming. His “newspapers” need a new “foreign correspondent” to track the spiderweb of Nazi spies who betrayed Livy and Peter, spies now selling their services to the highest bidder as the alliance between the Soviets and the British and Americans rapidly unravels. After receiving remedial etiquette lessons and an elegant new wardrobe, Livy infiltrates an embassy ball to acquire a list of the operatives. She gets the list only to be robbed of it at gunpoint by a mustachioed man. To retrieve the list, she must fly to Paris—where she meets up with a handsome American with a knack for good timing—and seek her nemesis.

Huie’s debut is an old-fashioned mystery shot through with tragedy; for aficionados of the glamour and romance of spycraft.