About This Book
In the aftermath of World War II, a chance discovery in Grand Central Terminal sets one woman on a collision course with a buried wartime secret. When Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase filled with photographs of unknown women, she begins pulling at a thread that unravels the story of twelve female secret agents who slipped into Occupied Europe and never came back. Jenoff weaves together three distinct timelines and perspectives — a grieving woman searching for answers in 1946, the steely spymaster who recruited and ran these agents, and a young mother who chose the most dangerous work imaginable — to build a portrait of courage that feels both intimate and enormous in scope.
What distinguishes this novel is how Jenoff handles the tension between the domestic and the dangerous. Her prose is clean and propulsive without sacrificing the emotional texture that makes these women feel fully realized rather than heroic archetypes. The three-strand structure rewards patient readers: each timeline illuminates the others, and the convergence lands with genuine weight. Jenoff clearly did her research into the SOE's real female operatives, and that grounding gives the fiction a specificity — the tradecraft details, the paranoia, the impossible choices — that sets it apart from more romanticized takes on the same era.