A Beacon in the Night

The suspenseful second installment in Lewis’s series featuring spy Caitrin Colline (after A Jewel in the Crown) opens on New Year’s Eve 1940 during the London Blitz. Caitrin, a former Welsh policewoman, meets her friend Florence Simmonds at the Blind Stag pub, managed by Caitrin’s flirtatious but thuggish friend Teddy Baer. Unbeknownst to her friends, Caitrin is an operative for 512, an all-female counterespionage group led by war widow Bethany Goodman. As Churchill threatens to shut 512 down due to budgetary constraints, German bombers target British cathedrals, hospitals, and aristocratic houses with uncanny accuracy. Caitrin has learned that Florence and Teddy may be involved in the placement of homing devices that lead the Nazi bombers to their targets, and she infiltrates Teddy’s inner circle to thwart the scheme. While some of Caitrin’s motives are strained—notably, her fierce determination to recover her mother’s ring from petty thieves rather than fight the Nazis who killed her fiancé—the action moves at a swift pace, the dialogue is sharp, and the well-placed historical details evoke the harrowing realities of English life during WWII. With a fierce heroine and nail-biting plot, this will delight fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Susan Elia MacNeal. (June)