The Widow Spy
Campisi’s premise is quite intriguing and based on a real situation: Kate Warne, Pinkerton’s first female detective and a Union spy, is assigned to the house containing the notorious socialite and Confederate spy, Rose O’Neal Greenhow, in Washington, DC, in August 1861. Kate’s mission is to ferret out Greenhow’s code used for sending messages across enemy lines to Richmond. The determined detective tries every tactic she knows to manipulate the canny widow and achieve her objective. But just who is manipulating whom? The adversarial Greenhow is as crafty and skilled as Kate at turning events to her advantage, and Kate becomes enmeshed in playing a high-stakes game that draws others in as well, including Greenhow’s own young daughter, fellow agent John Scobell, the visiting Mackall sisters, and spymaster Allan Pinkerton himself.
Campisi has developed and crafted a plausible and entertaining tale surrounding the early spying activities of the Civil War, with all its chaos, confusion, and political disruption. Her descriptions of early wartime Washington add depth and interest to her narrative, along with her lively and colorful characters, especially the two strong-willed women involved in this battle of wits and wills. While an enjoyable read, there are a couple of factual errors: it was Dolley Madison’s nephew, not her son, who married Greenhow’s sister, and Greenhow was en route to Wilmington, North Carolina (not South Carolina), when her ship sank off the coast. However, a larger issue is the author’s anachronisms, where several characters express modern-day attitudes concerning race, women, and labor. These sound out of place and tend to pull the reader out of the story instead of engaging with it.
