The Traitor Beside Her
A WWII Mystery
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
“Evans’s characters are vividly drawn, elevating this story and its revelations about women’s little-celebrated contributions to the war effort.”— Washington Post
"An exciting read with historical tidbits, a hint of danger, and a touch of romance."— Kirkus Reviews
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.
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.
"A fascinating and intelligent WWII home front story." —Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author for The Physicists' Daughter
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evans follows up The Physicists' Daughter with a lackluster second thriller featuring factory worker Justine Byrne. In 1944, U.S. Army Intelligence recruits Justine to Virginia's Arlington Hall, a women's college that's been transformed into an American code-breaking facility. Despite her gifts for cryptanalysis, Justine's handler, Paul, hasn't stationed her there to crack enemy messages—he's certain that Arlington Hall has been infiltrated by an enemy agent who has already disrupted the Allied war efforts and caused several deaths, and he wants her to ferret out the traitor. That traitor may also be responsible for the strangulation of a woman working for the head of the German code-cracking division. Justine's mole hunt, interspersed with her fending off unwelcome suitors as she embarks on a relationship with Paul, packs a certain amount of inherent drama, but it's largely undone by thin characters and purple prose ("Justine would always wonder if anyone saw her face when the first light of realization began to dawn"). Maisie Dobbs this is not.
