Mr. Churchill's Secretary: A Maggie Hope Mystery [Kindle Edition] Author: Susan Elia Macneal | Language: English | ISBN:
B004J4X9HE | Format: PDF, EPUB
Download Mr. Churchill's Secretary: A Maggie Hope Mystery
Download Download Mr. Churchill's Secretary: A Maggie Hope Mystery [Kindle Edition] for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link For fans of Jacqueline Winspear, Laurie R. King, and Anne Perry, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary captures the drama of an era of unprecedented challenge—and the greatness that rose to meet it.
London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds in British intelligence, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typist at No. 10 Downing Street. Her indefatigable spirit and remarkable gifts for codebreaking, though, rival those of even the highest men in government, and Maggie finds that working for the prime minister affords her a level of clearance she could never have imagined—and opportunities she will not let pass. In troubled, deadly times, with air-raid sirens sending multitudes underground, access to the War Rooms also exposes Maggie to the machinations of a menacing faction determined to do whatever it takes to change the course of history.
Ensnared in a web of spies, murder, and intrigue, Maggie must work quickly to balance her duty to King and Country with her chances for survival. And when she unravels a mystery that points toward her own family’s hidden secrets, she’ll discover that her quick wits are all that stand between an assassin’s murderous plan and Churchill himself.
In this daring debut, Susan Elia MacNeal blends meticulous research on the era, psychological insight into Winston Churchill, and the creation of a riveting main character, Maggie Hope, into a spectacularly crafted novel.
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- File Size: 1460 KB
- Print Length: 386 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0553593617
- Publisher: Bantam (April 3, 2012)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004J4X9HE
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,693 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #21
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > British - #83
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > British Detectives - #87
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > Historical
- #21
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > British - #83
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > British Detectives - #87
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > Historical
Maggie was supposed to be at MIT earning a graduate degree in advanced mathematics, but instead finds herself in WWII London trying to sell the rundown but elegant house she inherited from a grandmother she had never known. Born in England to British parents, Maggie hadn't been back since she was a baby, which was when she left to live in America with her aunt after her parents were killed in a car accident. At first the blip in her academic plans felt like an annoying roadblock, but after living in and enjoying London for a year, and with the war now started, she decides to stay and do her part. And after all, even with rations, blackouts and air raids, life goes on and most of the time is anything but grim. There's dancing, theater, good friends, and great housemates, including Paige, her longtime friend from home, Sarah, a ballerina who gets them all tickets to her shows and Charlotte, known as Chuck, who has a boyfriend in the RAF. Plus there's the job Maggie has gotten as secretary to Winston Churchill. Of course Maggie, with her knowledge of mathematics, languages, and codes, is qualified for much more than typing and filing, but women are excluded from that kind of work and at least she is contributing to the cause from a front row seat.
Author Susan Elia MacNeal is very good at crafting the right details to capture a scene and set a mood, and as Maggie's intellectual skills inevitably lead her to become more and more involved in secret and dangerous war work the pace of the novel accelerates until it is almost impossible to put down. It is mainly Maggie's story, but there are multiple points of view and in the early part of the novel it took a little vigilance to keep all the characters straight.
I quite enjoyed this book, with its engaging main character, Maggie Hope, a British-born American who, while closing her deceased grandmother's house, is caught in London by the outbreak of World War II. With time, I think that the Maggie mysteries could develop into a very good series, indeed. The author's handling of the various strands of the plot is clever, although she sometimes tipped her hand in planting false clues that seemed a bit obvious, inviting readerly speculation prematurely. Some episodes, however, called for a severe suspension of disbelief, as when it doesn't seem to occur to Maggie, the bright young mathematician, that the simple morse she is decoding, which initially makes no sense, might actually be in the language of the main enemy that the world is fighting, Nazi Germany--especially when she later proves to be fluent in German.
The 'meticulous research'--advertised in Bantam's blurbs--needs to be toned down and incorporated seamlessly into the narrative so that one barely notices it, because the history-mystery genre represents a minefield, in which one false step will cause the story to explode in the reader's face, which is what I felt happened about half-way through the book, when the narrative began to lose its credibility.
Such 'explosions' occur when the author trips over anachronisms that betray that she is not really at home in the British world, at least historically. One such has been noted by another reviewer, who observed that women (i.e., 'Aunt Edith') were not awarded Cambridge degrees until 1947.
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