The Traitor Beside Her
It’s December 14, 1944. A traitor lurks among the cryptographers in Arlington Hall, who are working to break Axis codes and help win World War II in Europe, still unsettled even after D-Day. Justine Byrne’s assignment is to go undercover among the cryptographers and find the spy who’s passing information to the enemy.
This is a captivating, well-researched novel of World War II espionage, built around a brainy and attractive protagonist. Justine and her fellow-agent and roommate, Georgette, must race against time as well as against the wiles of brilliant minds recruited to decipher the encrypted messages coming in from Europe. And practically everyone is a suspect. Justine and Georgette are novice secret agents. Luckily (if a bit unconvincingly) they manage to fool the enemy, and their handsome trainers have armed them with an array of protective gadgets that would delight James Bond if he’d been invented yet.
Evans, trained as a scientist and engineer, wields her historical and technical information with skill. It’s great fun to learn that the eight most common letters in English can be arranged into a handy anagram: ETON AIRS. Evans is also a polished and prolific mystery writer, so the pace is breakneck (the last German offensive of the war, the Battle of the Bulge, began on December 16, 1944), the plot is satisfyingly twisty, and the gadgets get to play their parts. She is the author of a previous series, the Faye Longchamp Archaeological Mysteries, so when this novel ends with a tantalizing reference to Los Alamos—where there really were
traitors among the atomic scientists—there’s reason to hope the intrepid Justine and Georgette will soon reappear in New Mexico.
