The Spies of Shilling Lane by Jennifer Ryan

The Spies of Shilling Lane introduces an unlikely heroine, fifty-year-old Mrs Braithwaite. Recently divorced, she’s alone and nobody likes her very much. She’s just too bossy and snooty – all of which means everyone’s happy to take her down a peg or two at the Ashcombe Women’s Voluntary Service.

With nothing to keep her at home, Mrs B heads to London to reconnect with her twenty-year-old daughter who abandoned the safety of the country for blitz-torn London. It’s 1941 and Mrs B is having doubts about what makes a successful life. She has written in her notebook that it’s something to do with social standing and how the world sees you, but she’s beginning to reconsider. Perhaps if she’d been a more sympathetic mother, she and Betty would be better friends.

Desperate to talk to Betty, Mrs B is disappointed when the timid, mousey landlord, Mr Norris, reveals that he hasn’t seen Betty for days, while nobody’s heard of her at the sewage works that supposedly employed her. Letters in Betty’s room reveal a secret life her mother could never have guessed at.

As bombs rain down by night, Mrs B and a reluctant Mr Norris become swept up in a plan to rescue Betty and to uncover goings on at a Nazi spy ring. While Mr Norris discovers an inner strength he didn’t know he possessed, Mrs B becomes a new person as well.

Jennifer Ryan (The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir) has returned to the wartime era and a new story of unlikely heroes and heroines, with a cast of quirky and original characters and a few plot twists along the way. While a gentle humour runs through the book, there’s also a strong emotional thread and the unwavering threat of invasion brings out the best and worst in everybody.

The Spies of Shilling Lane is a fun, light-hearted war story, if such a thing is possible, and leaves you wondering if Ryan might put the indomitable Mrs Braithwaite into a new adventure sometime soon. I hope so.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: The Spies of Shilling Lane

A School for Unusual Girls by Kathleen Baldwin

Strictly speaking the 'Stranje House' series is pitched at a YA (Young Adult) audience, but some of the best books I've read recently have been YA, so don't let that phase you. The first book in the series, A School for Unusual Girls, catapults us into a unique premise - a touch of the superhuman wrapped within regency period espionage, mystery and romance. A little bit Marvel meets Pride & Prejudice.

Stranje House presents as a finishing school for wayward young ladies - those who have exasperated their families, defied their governesses or been the cause of public scandal. Unbeknownst to aristocratic Lord & Lady parents, the school is actually a front. Forget etiquette lessons, these young ladies are being trained as unofficial Foreign Office agents in the arts of diplomacy, spying and kicking butt.

Each young lady is chosen for the unique gift they possess, gifts previously misunderstood and manifest only by scandalous behaviour. The first of these ladies we meet, Georgiana, has unfortunately burnt half her father's manor to the ground after a chemistry experiment gone awry. But hiding behind this beautiful seventeen year old is an astonishing mind. Desperate not to be banished to the foreboding Stranje House, Georgiana argues, "What if Sir Isaac Newton's parents had packed him off to a school to reform his manners?" But her parents, appalled by her brain, send her away, unknowingly into a dangerous plan to outmaneuver Napoleon. You see the Foreign Office have heard whispers about a remarkable ink she has been developing, which will allow their agents, hidden within Napoleon's ranks, to double-code communications. But all does not go according to plan, and we find the Stranje girls in France rescuing the very agents meant to protect them.

A fast-paced entertaining series, with just the right mix of intrigue, witty dialogue, action and romance (who can resist a dashing spy). And being YA fiction you can confidently introduce this regency-girl-power series to your daughters, nieces, or granddaughters too.     

In Books Two and Three, the Napoleonic war continues, first through the eyes of Tess the prophetic dreamer and then Jane, the strategic mastermind. Books Four and Five, releasing soon, round out the series.

Link to Stranje House Novel eBooks

Posted by Jaime

     

A House of Ghosts by W C Ryan

William Ryan is an award-winning Irish writer, known for his Captain Korolev series set in 1930s Moscow. Writing as W C Ryan, his latest book, A House of Ghosts, mixes mystery with an element of the supernatural.

The novel is set in 1917, on a wild and rugged island off the Devon coast, where sits Blackwater Abbey, the baronial pile belonging to Lord Highmount, a munitions entrepreneur. The Abbey is so old it is well and truly haunted and having lost both of their sons in the war, the Highmounts bring together two mediums in the hope of communicating with the dead.

But that isn’t all that is going on at the Abbey. London’s Whitehall suspects someone has been leaking plans for a new torpedo designed at Highmount’s factory. Among the guests, Madame Feda and Count Orlov are suspicious because they are, well, foreign. Also tagging along is Rolleston Miller-White, who has gambling debts and is engaged to Lord Highmount’s daughter Evelyn, and then there’s Lady Highmount who is Austrian. The suspects being to assemble.

Crossing in heavy seas as storms set to lash the island is Kate Cartwright, a Whitehall dog’s-body also on the guest-list. She’s an old family friend of the Highmounts and conveniently also has the gift of seeing ghosts. Kate adds eyes and ears for Whitehall agent Captain Donovan, masquerading as a valet, and the two make an uneasy alliance as they wait for the spy to make their move.

A House of Ghosts is a witty, action-packed yarn, filled with a varied cast of house-party guests and servants, reminiscent of Agatha Christie, but updated for twenty-first century tastes. There’s lots of snappy dialogue between Kate and Donovan, who are a brilliant odd couple: Donovan the stony-faced man of action; Kate, both intelligent and genteel, but set apart from her class because of her ‘special’ talent.

We are reminded of the popularity of spiritualism at a time when so many families were losing their sons to the carnage of World War One. And the Abbey is packed with ghosts who frequently find the antics of the living amusing. If you’re after a spine-tingling thrill, A House of Ghosts might not be the book for you, but there’s plenty of fun nonetheless. I whizzed through the novel enjoying every page.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: A House of Ghosts

MI5 and Me by Charlotte Bingham

I thought the name of the author was familiar, but it wasn’t until I read at the back that Charlotte Bingham had published, among other things, 33 best-selling novels that I remembered. Of course, that Charlotte Bingham. She also collaborated with her husband on scripts for Upstairs Downstairs, and made her publishing debut at nineteen with the memoir Coronet Among the Weeds.

In MI5 and Me, she returns decades later with a new memoir, about her time as a member of the typing pool in the 1950s British Secret Service. It was a career move foisted on her by her father, a bigwig at MI5 and reads a bit like a cross between Nancy Mitford and John Le Carré. Apparently Le Carré would later find inspiration for his character, George Smiley, in Charlotte’s father, which makes the book all the more interesting.

England at the time was wary of what went on behind the Iron Curtain and the possibilities of Communist infiltration. But the MI5 described seems very much to be making things up as it goes along, which provides lots of humour.

Her father bemoans the fact that he must always wear off-the-peg suits, so as not to draw attention to himself on his nefarious missions. There are always strange men to be entertained in the drawing room, which turn out to be Spooks. Things get livelier when her father takes on a couple of well-known actors to help with the cause, almost ruining the career by one of them when his Brechtian play is a flop.

Then there are Lottie’s co-workers – ex-Naval Commander Steerforth, who really has no idea how to be an effective MI5 manager, her much savvier chum, Arabella, with her glamorous mother who receives strange phone calls about herrings. What can it all mean?

Everything makes sense by the a final chapter which also reveals that this memoir had to be put on hold for fifty years before publication because of its sensitive material. MI5 and Me is as funny as it is surprising, capturing the silliness of the post-war reds-under-the-bed mentality of the time. Charlotte Bingham is such good company the pages fly by. Recommended.

Reviewed by JAM

Catalogue link: MI5 and Me