Mary's Bookcase : Check out Mary Anna Evans' fabulous novel

The Traitor Beside Her
By Mary Anna Evans
Audiobook narrated by Kimberly M. Wetherell

Publication Date: June 6th, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Page Length: 346 pages

Genre: Historical Mystery

"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

Excerpt

Justine reported to one of the guard stations at its gate, making sure that she stood in the line that led to a broad-shouldered man with a freshly clipped white-blonde crewcut and a wheelchair that was just like Jerry’s.

This was because he was Jerry.

She waited her turn and then, in a quiet, well-bred murmur, she gave Jerry paperwork identifying her by her Paul-assigned alias, Miss Samantha Ogletree. Jerry had more practice in working undercover than Justine did, so he looked at her without the slightest glimmer of recognition. Deep in her Miss Ogletree persona, she gave him the briefest and most demure glance possible.

According to Miss Ogletree’s fictional biography, she was still a little young to be considered a spinster, but she was so withdrawn that she would probably achieve that status in a few years. Until she’d gotten on the train for Washington, she’d lived with her parents and taught singing lessons for her pin money. She had never once been alone with a man. Justine decided that the best way to physically embody Miss Ogletree was to look at her toes as much as possible.

She was rather proud of the tremulous stammer she used to address Jerry, who looked very handsome and very male in his work clothes, black heavy coat, and gray homburg hat, and heavy coat.

She handed him the folded piece of paper that bore official confirmation of her work assignment. “Sir? Ex—excuse me, sir? I’m supposed to start work in in just a few minutes, and I don’t want to be late. Can you point me in the right direction?”

There was no way that Miss Samantha Ogletree would have been able to hold Jerry’s gaze, so Justine didn’t. Instead, she peered into her handbag for the fake driver’s license that Paul had given her. Before she could retrieve it, a voice rose above the sounds of a busload of women reporting for work. It trembled in a different way from the stammering quaver that Justine was faking. It trembled from age. It was an old man’s voice calling out a name that made Justine’s heart freeze.

The name wasn’t Samantha and it wasn’t Justine, but it also wasn’t a name that she could ignore.

“Isabel!” cried the old man. “Isabel Byrne!”

Her head rose reflexively and turned in his direction. She couldn’t have kept her eyes on her toes if she’d tried, not with that name echoing in her ears. For just an instant, she expected to hear a familiar voice calling out to answer him. It was her mother’s voice, and she hadn’t heard it in three years. Her mother was dead, and Justine would never hear her voice again.

A rotund man zig-zagged through the crowd, somehow managing to pay each and every person in his path an Old World gesture of respect.

“Excuse me, Madam,” he said, nodding at one woman. Justine’s ear caught the faintest possible accent in the way he pronounced “Madam.” Was it German?

“I beg your pardon,” he asked of the next person.

“Excuse me. I must see my friend,” he murmured to another with a tiny bow.

Finally, he drew close enough to take both Justine’s hands in his. He stood there, beaming, as she tried to figure out what was happening.

“Isabel,” he said again. Then his brow furrowed. “But…I forgot. I forgot that you’re dead.”

He put his hand to his forehead in a way that suggested age or fatigue or illness. Then he brightened.

“My apologies,” he said, inclining his head in another small bow, “You cannot be Isabel. You are far too young, and now I remember that she is…” His voice cracked. “My dear friends Isabel and Gerard are no longer with us.”

The old man’s face was very near hers now. It was chubby and pink, framed by thin white hair and a thicker white goatee and mustache. As she watched, his pale blue eyes brightened, and his thin lips twisted into a smile. “But something of Isabel and Gerard is here. You’re Justine! Look at you! You could be no one else. My, how you look like your dear mother. And like your father, too, a bit.”

Justine suppressed a shiver when she realized that the man was right. Her mother’s hair had been blond, and she’d worn silver-rimmed glasses until her sight was fully gone. She had an urge to run find a mirror, so she could see what her mother had looked like before she knew her.

The hands gripped hers and shook them. “I’m sorry for my confusion. It happens to people of my age from time to time. Time grows twisted when you have seen a great deal of it. I know who you are now. You are Justine Byrne. And I must re-introduce myself to you. I am Karl Becker. I knew you when you were small, so very small, but it is not possible that you remember. I knew your parents when they were studying in Chicago, and they often came back to visit after they moved to New Orleans.”

He shook her hands again, hard. “Oh, my dear. When I asked for an assistant, I had no idea that I would receive one so capable.”

Justine knew full well that she was not reporting to a job assisting Karl Becker with whatever he did. She was to work for Dr. Edison van Dorn in the Signal Security Agency’s German section. She was to pretend to be a not-terribly-bright clerical worker so uninteresting that people forgot she was there while they had conversations in a language that they thought she didn’t know.

This encounter with Karl meant that she had already failed. They were surrounded by people listening in on their conversation, and he’d just announced that she wasn’t Samantha Ogletree right in front of them. She hadn’t yet admitted that anything he was saying was correct, but any of these people could be an enemy agent on the lookout for people who weren’t who they said they were. She knew for a fact that there was at least one agent embedded at Arlington Hall. It was why she’d gotten this assignment in the first place.

Becker cupped her chin. “I could ask for no better assistant. No child of your parents…no daughter of your mother…could fail to be capable. When you were eight years old, you spoke better German than anyone who works for me now. We carried on extensive conversations about your math homework, all of them in my native tongue. My goodness, how I’ve needed you here. It seems that I merely had to wait for you to grow up.”

And now everyone within the sound of his voice knew that this man was absolutely sure that she spoke German. She needed to abort this mission.

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Mary Anna Evans

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.

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