The Last Hope: A Maggie Hope Mystery
The Last Hope comes as a bittersweet title for fans of Susan Elia MacNeal’s popular Maggie Hope series, which stars a brilliant, beautiful, redheaded, Anglo-Irish-American agent during World War II. The year is 1944. Maggie’s final assignment is to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist suspected of producing a fission bomb for the Nazis in time to win the war. This dangerous job takes her from her London home base and longtime true love, John Sterling, first to Portugal and then to Spain—both technically neutral but ruled by authoritarian dictators and infested with intrigue.
Besides the potential fission bomb, another plot is also afoot to negotiate a separate peace between Germany and the Allies. To quash both threats is a nearly impossible assignment.
But, disguised as Paige Kelly (her long-established undercover identity), Maggie boldly plunges into this very risky milieu and navigates a sequence of terrifying adventures full of deathly twists and surprises, which require her to employ both her advanced knowledge of math and physics and her raw courage, as well as a fashionable wardrobe.
Throughout the Hope series, MacNeal makes interesting use of actual historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Coco Chanel, both featured in this novel as well as Maggie’s long-term handler, Kim Philby … a name to set off alarm bells in the mind of any reader who knows the history of the Cold War.
It’s a bit of a surprise that the Hope series ends before the war does, but MacNeal does tidy up her plot lines and hint at some happy endings after peace breaks out. As always, her writing is accomplished, research impeccable, and characters well-drawn, particularly the many-faced Coco Chanel.
