Books Set in Europe; France

The Paris Agent, by Kelly Rimmer (2023)

This novel follows two female British Special Operatives Executive (SOE) spies whose lives will be determined by a double agent in their midst.  This novel is loosely based on the women who served in the SOE during World War II.

Read: September 27, 2025

3.5 stars

Books Set in Europe, Madrid, Spain

The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffiths, Countess of Romanones, by Larry Loftis (2021)

 

Aline Griffith (1923 ~ 2017) was born Pearl River, New York, a sleepy little town in outside of New York City, to a middle-class family.  She had big dreams and longed to make a name for herself.  After graduating from college, she landed a job as a model with New York fashion designer Hattie Carnegie.  While it wasn’t her dream job, she did learn poise and a fashion sense.

 

A chance meeting at a dinner party one night in the early 1940s with an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative changed the course of her life.  She was given mysterious instructions and told to show up at a building in Washington, D.C., and give a false name.  That led to her training to become an operative with the OSS.  After completing the training course, she was sent to Madrid, Spain in the midst of World War II.  There she was to search for Nazi supporters in the supposedly neutral Spain.  She rubbed elbows with the rich and famous and dated many glamorous men.

 

After the War, she married Luis Figeuroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, making her an instant countess.  Her husband’s grandfather was Álvaro de Figeuroa, who had served as Prime Minister of Spain in the early 1910s.  She mostly retired from the spy business after her marriage, but in the 1950s she occasionally took on secret information-gathering missions for the CIA.

 

Her actual involvement in espionage was not well enumerated.  The author describes one event when Aline takes in some female operatives into her home, and one woman was sleeping in her bed.  Later, Aline discovers that the woman had been shot and killed while sleeping.  Aline called her handler and they quietly removed the body before morning.  The author, however, acknowledges that it is difficult to determine what is real and what is not because Aline, herself, provided very contradictory versions of various events.

 

Most of the book describes the life of high society in Spain during.  The author describes the sport of bullfighting in detail and introduces the reader to some of the most famous bullfighters of that era.  Aline traveled in circles where she met and became friends with many of the bullfighters.  From reading this book, one gathers that most of her time as a spy was attending cocktail parties and bullfights.

 

During the War, Aline seems to be nervous about having too much contact with Nazis.  After the 
War, however, she considers the Duchess of Windsor, a known Nazi sympathizer, as one of her closest friends.

 

The book was mildly interesting.  I expected to learn more about a female spy during World War II, and not the antics of a high-society partier.

 

Read:  April 26, 2023

 

3 Stars

 

Books Set in North America: United States, Washington, D.C.

The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: The Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets, by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee (2016)

In 2000, an informant provided the FBI with a package that contained a sample of confidential documents and pages of codes that, once deciphered, indicated that the writer was offering to sell United States top secret documents.  A clue as to the identity of the letter’s writer was the fact that many words were misspelled.  After an exhaustive search, the FBI identified the writer as Brian P. Regan, a disgruntled security specialist with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), who, realizing that he wasn’t getting a promotion, decided to supplement his income by selling classified intelligence to foreign countries.  His first target was Libya, before moving on to Iraq and China.

The author explored Regan’s childhood.  He was from a working-class family and was a bit of an odd duck.  In school, he was often the butt of jokes.  He learned early on that cheating helped him move on with his life.  By cheating on the entrance exams, he enlisted in the military as a non-commissioned officer.  He had a talent for cracking codes, which landed him a job with the NRO.

After marrying and beginning a family, he soon found himself heavily in debt.  Hence, his scheme to sell America’s secrets to foreign powers.  For this amateur, this proved to be more difficult than he imagined.  He copied numerous top secret and confidential papers and buried them throughout federal properties.  He encrypted the location of these papers with a complex code.  These buried documents were to provide him with insurance in the event that he was ever caught.

Regan sent numerous coded letters to foreign powers with the offer to sell secrets, but none of his contact took his bait.

The author provided a brief history on code and encryption, dating back thousands of years.

This was a fascinating book and a true-life thriller.

Read:  January 13, 2023

4 Stars

Books Set in North America, United States, New York, New York

The Hours Count, by Jillian Cantor (2015)

This novel imagines a friendship between Ethel Rosenberg and (fictional) Mildred Stein.  Ethel and Julius (Julie) Rosenberg and the Steins are two young couples living an high-rise in Knickerbocker Village in the Lower East Side, New York in the 1940s.  The Rosenbergs are a loving couple with 2 young sons.  The Steins, on the other hand, are in a loveless marriage with a young autistic son.

Ed Stein was an immigrant from Russia.  He and Millie married mostly because it was time and Ed needed an American wife.  When it becomes clear that their son, David, is not “normal” and is unable to communicate with anyone, Ed loses interest in him and is continually pestering Millie for another child.

At this period in history, Russians are looked upon with suspicion and communism is becoming a dirty word.  At a party of fellow communist at the Rosenberg’s apartment, Millie meets Dr. Jake Gold, who claims he is friends with the Rosenberg’s, although Ethel later denies known him.  Jake Gold is a psychologist and tells Millie that he can help her son.  Soon Millie and David are meeting Dr. Gold on a regular basis.  David takes a liking to Dr. Gold, and Millie finds herself falling in love with him.

Millie takes a trip with David, ostensibly to visit the Rosenberg’s in the Catskills, with a brief stop to be with Jake Gold.  They have a one-night stand, and Millie becomes pregnant.  Things Jake tells her, however, that Millie knows are not true.  Still, she continues to long for him, as her own marriage begins to crumble.  Can she trust Jake even though she knows he doesn’t always tell her the truth?  [Spoiler:  Jake Gold is actually an FBI agent who was investigating Soviet spies.]

Soon it becomes apparent that the FBI is on the lookout for “atomic” spies, and suspicion falls on Ed Stein, who disappears from the family, and the Rosenbergs.  The novel begins on the day Ethel Rosenberg is to be executed.  Millie believes that Ethel is innocent and claims to have proof that will exonerate her.

I found this book to be annoying.  It started off well, but Millie’s pining for Jake didn’t ring true.  Furthermore, the author changed the names of the Rosenberg’s children for no apparent reason.  Although there is a kernel of truth in the novel (the Rosenberg’s were tried, found guilty of espionage and executed), the fictional story of Millie’s life and longing for Jake got in the way of the story.

Read:  November 11, 2021

2 Stars

Books Set in a Global Environment: United States and USSR

Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War, by Giles Whittell (2010)

This book of non-fiction delves into the events leading up to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Berlin Wall.  In the 1950s, Willie Fisher, also known as Rudolf Abel, was in the United States as an undercover agent for the USSR.  Through a comedy of errors, he was captured by the FBI, tried and sent to Federal Prison.

Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot hired by the CIA to fly reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union to look for Soviet missile sites.  He piloted a U-2, which could fly at unimaginable heights.  It was believed that the plane was shot down, survival of the pilot was not possible.  All that changed on May 1, 1960, when the U-2 Powers was flying was, indeed, shot down over the USSR and Powers survived the crash.  He was immediately captured, tried as a spy and imprisoned.

Around the same time, wanderlust Frederic Pryor, was studying communist economics at the Free University in West Berlin.  Until the Berlin Wall was constructed, he freely crossed between East and West Berlin.  A fact not unnoticed by the East German police.  He was arrested on suspicion of spying and imprisoned.  He had no connections with the US Government, but his parents were wealthy and were acquainted with some powerful men in Washington.

Bridge of Spies sets the foundation of the nuclear missile discussions, or lack thereof, between the two superpowers.  Shortly before Powers was shot down, US President Eisenhower and Soviet leader Khrushechv were poised to meet in Paris to discuss a nuclear test ban treaty.  The U-2 incident derailed the meeting with a growing distrust evident between the US and the Soviet Union.  The author details the tensions and misunderstandings of both leaders.

Two years later, however, tempers had cooled somewhat, and each country recognized the benefits of holding a prisoner exchange.  The details of the exchange were carefully planned.  Abel had an inkling that an exchange might be possible, but Powers and Pryor were completely unprepared.

This is a very readable history of the events leading up to, and surrounding the U-2 incident and its impact on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Read: December 19, 2018

5 Stars

Books Set Globally: Dubai, America and Italy

The Flight Attendant, by Chris Bohjalian (2018)

The novel begins when Cassie Bowden, a flight attendant in her light 30s, awoke in a strange hotel room in Dubai next to the bloody body of Alex Sokolov. Cassie was a binge drinker who experienced frequent black-outs whenever she drank.  Upon seeing the dead Alex, she briefly wondered whether or not she killed him during one of her black-outs.  She tried to recall the events of the previous evening, but remembered only that she had dinner with Alex and returned with him to his hotel instead of the hotel where the other flight attendants were housed.  She vaguely recalled that a woman named Miranda joined them briefly in Alex’s hotel room.

Instead of contacting the authorities, she quickly dressed and returned to her hotel, discarding any potential evidence of the night along the way. Upon joining her flight crew, she began her series of lies.  Alex had been on the flight from New York to Dubai, which is where Cassie first met him. By the time the return flight arrived in New York, his body had been discovered, and because Alex was an American, the FBI wanted to interview the crew members on his original flight.

Cassie realized that she could be in legal trouble so contacts a lawyer recommended by the flight crew’s union.  When interviewed by the FBI, Cassie blurted out that she had spent the night with Alex, but lied saying that he had been alive when she left his room.  

Alex was a hedge fund manager, with ties to Russia.  Could there be more to his story that Cassie knew?  Why was the FBI so interested in Alex?  And what of Miranda?  What was her relationship with Alex?

This was a very quick read and entertaining until the last couple of chapters. The novel then went off the rails with a very bizarre ending that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Read: August 15, 2018

3.5 Stars

Books Set in the United States and Britain

An Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva (1995)

Daniel Silva is known for his spy and espionage series of books in which Gabriel Allon is the hero. The Unlikely Spy, however, is not a part of this series. The Unlikely Spy is Silva’s first novel, and what a tale he tells.

This story focuses on the secrecy surrounding the events that lead up to the Allies’ landing on Normandy on D-Day. The British have an elaborate false network of intelligence using Double Cross to leak to the Germans. The information must be plausible, but not too readily available so that it is believable. Some of the information, therefore, is real, and some is completely false.

Germany has a special V-chain of spies living in Britain to be activated when the need should arise. Among the deeply hidden spies is Anna Steiner, known now as Catherine Blake. She has been quietly living in London for the past 6 years, taking the identities of others who she either killed or who had died as infants.

After Hitler ordered infiltration of MI5, Britain’s intelligence, Catherine is called to duty. She is a beautiful loner who was recruited and manipulated by Vogel, a German Abwehr officer who has fallen in love with her. (Why are all female spies beautiful?)

British Intelligence, for its part, has recruited Alfred Vicary, a middle-aged bachelor who still pines for Helen, the love of his life, who dropped him when her father threatened to cut off her inheritance. Vicary had his knee shattered in World War II. He has been working as a university professor when he was tapped into service by the MI5. His background, therefore, makes him an unlikely spy. He finds that he enjoys much of the work and is quite suited for his new-found profession.

Silva skillfully reveals bits and pieces of the puzzle, switching between the actions of the British and the Germans, leaving the reader to wonder just who can be trusted.

Clearly, a lot of careful research went into writing this book. The story is based on actual events surrounding the D-Day invasion. Even though we all know that the Allies’ plans to invade were successful, Silva carefully describes how the plans were could have been thwarted.

A quick, but exciting read.

Read: April 30, 2010