Book Title: The Traitor Beside Her
Series: The Justine Byrne Historical Mysteries
Author: Mary Anna Evans
Publication Date: June 6, 2023
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Page Length: 346
Genre: Historical Mystery
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The Traitor Beside Her
Mary Anna Evans
Audiobook narrated by Kimberly M. Wetherell
"Evans's characters are vividly drawn, elevating this story and its revelations about women's little-celebrated contributions to the war effort."— Washington Post
"An exciting read with historical tidbits, a hint of danger, and a touch of romance."— Kirkus Reviews
The Traitor Beside Her is an intricately plotted WWII espionage novel weaving together mystery, action, friendship, and a hint of romance perfect for fans of The Rose Code and Code Name Helene.
Justine Byrne can't trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women's college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers.
Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn't there to decipher German codes—she's there to find a traitor.
Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, a fluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.
"A fascinating and intelligent WWII home front story." —Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author for The Physicists' Daughter
The Traitor Beside Her
by
Mary Anna Evans
She was face to face with Paul for the first time in weeks. Still in her coveralls and still holding her lunch box, Justine stood in front of his desk, trying and failing to deny that he was part of the reason her heart raced. Even after time apart, she was still drawn to the intelligent blue eyes behind his glasses and to the sly sense of humor that he showed so rarely. His lopsided smile still struck her like a fist. She was still attracted to the lean frame beneath his well-cut suit, long-legged and broad-shouldered but rangy. She wanted him to be pleased with her work, but she wanted more than that.
There had been a time when she’d thought he wanted more than that, too, but no trace of those feelings showed on a motionless face that was as pale as hers, only without the freckles. From the look of him, this man had no feelings at all, and he never had.
Jerry sat with his wheelchair parked beside Paul’s desk, his white-blond head cocked at an angle that let him meet her eyes almost head-on, but not quite. He had met her at the bus stop with a warm hello and a congratulatory pat on the back, and they’d come up on the elevator together. He’d greeted her with, “Hey, Justine,” then gone silent.
She’d tried to make conversation, asking, “Have you seen Georgette lately?
All she’d gotten in return was, “Not since New Orleans.”
She’d answered, “Me neither,” and then the elevator doors had opened.
Paul’s office was at the end of a short hall with only one door. That door opened into the office of a middle-aged woman who seemed to be his secretary, since the door behind her desk opened into the larger office where he waited. In Paul’s solemn presence, even Jerry lost his ready smile.
Justine looked around for a chair and saw none, so she stood in silence. If this was how agents were debriefed after successful missions, she’d hate to see what happened when they failed.
Dressed like a banker in a sober gray suit, Paul regarded her through horn-rimmed glasses. She missed the wire-rimmed pair that he’d worn before she’d known that he was a government agent. He barely looked like the same man who had worked with her at a New Orleans munitions plant. His coveralls and working man’s demeanor had vanished. Now, everything about his appearance was completely buttoned down. The stray lock that had always dangled in his eyes had been slicked back with hair cream until his hair was as motionless as his eyes.
“So,” he said, “give me your report.”
She didn’t know what he wanted to hear, so she started at the beginning. “I reported to the Washington Navy Yard and was assigned to work under a man named Danny, just as you told me to expect. I monitored the behavior of my coworkers, looking for someone who might be planning to sell naval plans and someone who might be planning to buy them. I soon identified two men whose behavior concerned me.”
“How so?”
“They had brief, intense conversations periodically—about once a day—but otherwise they ignored each other. It was an odd pattern, as if they were friends, but only sometimes.”
“Were you able to get close to either of them?”
“I tried. They both resisted my efforts to strike up a conversation.”
Jerry finally cracked a smile. “I can’t imagine how they resisted your charm. When you want to be, you’re as appealing as a spring morning.”
Justine rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe they didn’t find me attractive. Or interesting in any way. They didn’t seem to want any friends at all, which I thought was suspicious in itself. I decided to just hang back and watch. Today, that strategy paid off.”
“How so?”
She was shocked at the complete lack of…anything…in his Paul’s voice. No approval. No note of congratulations. No emotion at all.
“I saw the money change hands with my own eyes. And the plans.” She was humiliated by the note of desperation that she heard in her voice.
Why was she letting him make her feel this way? She’d successfully identified an enemy spy, just as she’d been told to do.
“Once the transaction was done, I told Jerry. He hasn’t said that he failed to stop my target from getting away, so I presume they’re in custody now.”
“Jerry, did you take anyone into custody today?”
Jerry hesitated, looking down at his lap. Then he flicked a glance at Justine, and she thought she saw an apology in his eyes. “I did not.”
“Thank you.” There was no apology in Paul’s eyes as they drilled into Justine’s. “Jerry, will you leave us to speak alone?”
Jerry nodded and wheeled himself to the door without looking at her again. She heard the latch click behind her and knew that he was gone.
“What’s happening here?” she asked. “Why are you treating me this way?”
“There was no transaction today. There was no enemy spy trying to get blueprints for Navy ships. There was no traitor willing to sell them to the highest bidder.”
“But I saw—”
“You saw what I wanted you to see. You saw two of my agents passing envelopes back and forth, and that is all.”
He reached in his breast pocket and pulled out two familiar envelopes, green and brown. Opening the green one, he pulled out a sheaf of Monopoly money and riffled it in his hands like a man who had just come into a multicolored fortune.
Justine felt blood rush to her face, although she couldn’t have told whether it was from humiliation or anger. “Did Jerry know?”
“Jerry knew.”
Justine had never failed at anything, not at work and certainly not at school, but she was about to be fired before she even figured out who she was working for. She was going to have to get herself home to New Orleans, find a sad little boarding house room like the one she’d left, and start her life over. Again.
“Come here.”
Justine didn’t like Paul’s tone, and she figured that he was only going to be her boss for another thirty seconds or so, so she stood firm. All he got from her was an angry shake of the head.
“Come here, please.”
His voice wasn’t noticeably warmer, but the “please” softened his commanding tone enough for her to be willing to comply. Her work boots clomped on the dull linoleum floor as she walked slowly around his gray-painted steel desk.
He waved a hand that said, “Closer,” so she moved even nearer to the desk chair where he sat. She was so close that she would have been able to feel the heat coming off any other man’s body, but Paul seemed to be operating at room temperature. Nothing radiated from him, nothing at all.
Buy Links:
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Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Traitor-Beside-Her-Novel/dp/1464215588
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Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-traitor-beside-her
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-traitor-beside-her-mary-anna-evans/18743820
Audio Buy Links:
Audiobooks.com: https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/672506/
Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Traitor-Beside-Her-Audiobook/B0BVDLCL7J
Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds degrees in physics and engineering, a background that, as it turns out, is ideal for writing her Justine Byrne series, which began with The Physicists’ Daughter and continues with her new book, The Traitor Beside Her. She describes Justine as “a little bit Rosie-the-Riveter and a little bit Bletchley Park codebreaker.”
Mary Anna’s crime fiction has earned recognition that includes two Oklahoma Book Awards, the Will Rogers Medallion Awards Gold Medal, and the Benjamin Franklin Award, and she co-edited the Edgar-nominated Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie.
Website: https://www.maryannaevans.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maryannaevans
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-anna-evans-a7642810/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maryannaevans/
Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/mary-anna-evans
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Mary-Anna-Evans/author/B001JP9ZY2
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12395.Mary_Anna_Evans
Thank you for hosting Mary Anna Evans today, Judith!
ReplyDeleteCathie xx
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