Once she'd been so sure of black and white, of right and wrong. She wasn't anymore. But she was certain of one thing—while there was no such thing as a good war, this particular one was a necessary war.

I have to start this off with a warning because this review might just turn into me rambling about how great this book is. I absolutely love this series and love reading about Maggie Hope. I didn't expect to finish this book the same day that I started it but once I picked it up I just couldn't put it down.

Maggie went through some really traumatic things during her mission in Berlin so now she has decided to go teach at her old spy training camp. Maggie is really depressed and has basically turned into a different person. When she finds herself investigating a case in which ballerinas, one of which is her friend Sarah, she uncovers horrifying things but she also manages to distract herself from her depression.

I really felt sorry for Maggie in the beginning of this book. She was just a completely different person and it was hard to see her so cold. She was still struggling from the events that happened in Berlin and it was great to see her slowly get better once she started the investigation. I just loved the emotional depth in this book and really enjoy Maggie Hope's growth throughout the series.

There were a couple other story lines that were also being played out in addition to following Maggie and I found those story lines to be interesting as well. I like how some of the story lines eventually connected. I have to say that the story line with Clara Hess was crazy (that woman is just crazy) but it was really easy to get sucked in to it.

I think that I found a minor discrepancy between the previous book in the series and this book. In this book Maggie says that Hugh never told her why he was fired by MI-5 but I went back and looked in the previous book in the series and he did tell her why. It is very minor and doesn't affect the story any but I noticed it because I had just re-read the other books of the series.

I loved Maggie's cat K (or Mr. K). I loved his personality and how Maggie was able to connect with him and how he helped her heal a bit. I am really hoping to see more of Mr. K in this series.

Overall I loved this book for Maggie's emotional depth and growth, Clara Hess' livening of the book with her psychoness, Mr. K's amazing personality, oh and getting to see David and John working together again. I highly recommend this book and series if you enjoy WWII historical fiction. I eagerly await the next installment in the series.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the galley.

I think I might have found a discrepancy between this book and the previous book in the series. I say might because Maggie is definitely in a fragile mental state and that is what could have caused the discrepancy. Maggie claimed in this book that Hugh didn't tell her why he was fired from MI-5 but I went back and looked in the previous book and he did tell her. I do think that it might be from her mental state.

Other than that I have had no problems with this. I absolutely love Maggie's new cat (who ended up choosing her), K (or Mr. K). Can't wait to read more.

June is going to be a very busy reading month for me. I have a whole list of books just from NetGalley that I need to read in June so I am just going to list those books. Other than my NetGalley books I haven't really decided what else I want to read and quite frankly I am not sure I'll have much time to read anything else as it is absolutely beautiful outside so I'll be spending less time reading.

NetGalley books to read in June:

The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones:

I am reading this one right now and it has been great so far. Here is an excerpt from the book description:

Stephen Lloyd Jones's debut novel is a sweeping thriller that extends from the present day, to Oxford in the 1970s, to Hungary at the turn of the 19th century, all tracing back to a man from an ancient royal family with a consuming passion--a boy who can change his shape, insert himself into the intimate lives of his victims, and destroy them.

The Prime Minister's Secret Agent by Susan Elia MacNeal:

This is the fourth book in the Maggie Hope Mystery Series. I love this series and cannot wait to read this one. Here is the book description:

World War II rages on across Europe, but Maggie Hope has finally found a moment of rest on the pastoral coast of western Scotland. Home from an undercover mission in Berlin, she settles down to teach at her old spy training camp, and to heal from scars on both her body and heart. Yet instead of enjoying the quieter pace of life, Maggie is quickly drawn into another web of danger and intrigue. When three ballerinas fall strangely ill in Glasgow—including one of Maggie’s dearest friends—Maggie partners with MI-5 to uncover the truth behind their unusual symptoms. What she finds points to a series of poisonings that may expose shocking government secrets and put countless British lives at stake. But it’s the fight brewing in the Pacific that will forever change the course of the war—and indelibly shape Maggie’s fate.

The Girl in 6E by A.R. Torre:

I requested this immediately after reading the book description. It sounds awesomely creepy. Here is the book description:

I haven't touched a human in three years. That seems like it would be a difficult task, but it's not. Not anymore, thanks to the internet.

I am, quite possibly, the most popular recluse ever. Not many shut-ins have a 200-member fan club, a bank account in the seven-figure range, and hundreds of men lining up to pay for undivided attention.

They get satisfaction, I get a distraction. Their secret desires are nothing compared to why I hide... my lust for blood, my love of death.
Taking their money is easy. Keeping all these secrets... one is bound to escape.
What if you hid yourself away because all you could think of was killing? And what if one girl's life depending on you venturing into society?
Enter a world of lies, thrills, fears, and all desires, in this original thriller from A. R. Torre.

The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson:

I'm running out of steam here so from now on all you're getting are the book descriptions:

In a society steeped in tradition, Princess Lia’s life follows a preordained course. As First Daughter, she is expected to have the revered gift of sight—but she doesn’t—and she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham when they arrange her marriage to secure an alliance with a neighboring kingdom—to a prince she has never met.

On the morning of her wedding, Lia flees to a distant village. She settles into a new life, hopeful when two mysterious and handsome strangers arrive—and unaware that one is the jilted prince and the other an assassin sent to kill her. In The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, deception abounds, and Lia finds herself on the brink of unlocking perilous secrets—even as she finds herself falling in love.

The Butcher by Jennifer Hillier:

A rash of grisly serial murders plagued Seattle until the infamous “Beacon Hill Butcher” was finally hunted down and killed by police chief Edward Shank in 1985. Now, some thirty years later, Shank, retired and widowed, is giving up his large rambling Victorian house to his grandson Matt, whom he helped raise.

Settling back into his childhood home and doing some renovations in the backyard to make the house feel like his own, Matt, a young up-and-coming chef and restaurateur, stumbles upon a locked crate he’s never seen before. Curious, he picks the padlock and makes a discovery so gruesome it will forever haunt him… Faced with this deep dark family secret, Matt must decide whether to keep what he knows buried in the past, go to the police, or take matters into his own hands.

Meanwhile Matt’s girlfriend, Sam, has always suspected that her mother was murdered by the Beacon Hill Butcher—two years after the supposed Butcher was gunned down. As she pursues leads that will prove her right, Sam heads right into the path of Matt’s terrible secret.

A thriller with taut, fast-paced suspense, and twists around every corner, The Butcher will keep you guessing until the bitter, bloody end.

Bravo by Greg Rucka:

The thrilling follow-up to Alpha continues the Jad Bell series from New York Times bestselling author Greg Rucka.
Still recovering from traumas both physical and emotional, Jad Bell is tasked with bringing in the Uzbek, principal organizer of the terrorist attack that nearly cost Bell his ex-wife and daughter. But the Uzbek's just the beginning: his employer, the Architect, has already set in motion another, even more devastating attack.

At the center of it all are two women under deep cover. One, as beautiful as she is deadly, has just been dispatched on American soil to execute the Architect's deadly plans. The other is an American just emerging from a complex web of lies, whose intel may be the only hope Bell has to stop the assault before it begins. But after years of pretending to be somebody else, can she be trusted?

Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis:

David (as he's currently known) was a member of an elite corps of spies trained during the coldest days of the Cold War. For almost a decade he has been out of the game, working as a sculptor. Then a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him: the only other survivor from that elite corps has gone rogue. David is tasked with stopping him.

What ensues is an existential cat-and-mouse game played out across the American landscape, through the diners and motels that dot the terrain like green plastic houses on a Monopoly board. Both a suspenseful novel of pursuit and a thematically rich exploration of the mind of a spy, Death Will Have Your Eyes is a contemporary classic of the espionage genre.

A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre:

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
 
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
 
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.

In this fourth entry in the Maggie Hope mystery series, we find cryptoanalyst Maggie at Arisaig House, in Scotland, working as a trainer for her fellow agents.  She is suffering from what we now recognize as PTSD as a result of her time in Berlin (ref. "His Majesty's Hope," the previous novel).  Her early-morning wanderings provide the first clue about what's happening around her when she sees a dead sheep covered in unusual blisters in the loch; not all is normal in the Highlands.

In the mean while, Maggie's mother, the Nazi spy Clara Hess, is being held in London pending execution ... and is showing signs of multiple personality disorder ... or is she?  Not even her doctor can say for sure whether the professional actress is pretending or it's the real thing.

And for the other major plot point, we have the Japanese planning their attack on Pearl Harbor, with glimpses into the diplomatic process and some speculation as to how it failed.

The series is peopled with characters both fictional and non-fictional (then-SOE agent Ian Fleming, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, just to name two), and keeps the reader's attention.  Whether it's a death at a performance of the Vic-Wells ballet (at which point Maggie's knowledge of the rather obscure science/tradition of floriography comes into play), or the blithe lifestyle of the commanders at Pearl Harbor, there is always something to keep the plot moving at a good pace as well.

Author Susan Elia MacNeal has created a family of delightful characters to care about, and puts them in plots that keep us turning pages well into the night.  I can't wait for the next one.