The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Amanda Quick *****

The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Amanda Quick is set in the 1930s but has nothing to do with the economic difficulties of the period. Anna Harris is a secretary to Helen Spencer, a “bold, adventurous, and daring” woman, who is murdered on page 1. Being a generous boss, Helen leaves Anna with a fancy wardrobe, a sporty Packard coupe, a shoebox of money, a mysterious, but valuable notebook, and a gun. In her dying moment, Helen wrote a message to Anna using her own blood: RUN. Anna does what any sensible woman would do. She changed her name (Irene Glasson) and moved to Hollywood. Thus, begins a thriller of Hollywood, espionage, and murders (too many to count).

The story intertwines two stories: one of espionage and the other of Hollywood. The espionage story involves the notebook Anna acquires in the first chapter. The up-and-coming actor Nick Tremayne stars in the Hollywood plot. It seems that women who get in the way of Nick’s career seem to mysteriously drown. One in a bathtub, another in a pool, a third in the ocean. Irene, who has reinvented herself as a scandal sheet reporter, takes it as a personal challenge to break open this story. She is assisted by a retired magician Oliver Ward) who owns an exclusive resort (reminded me of Santa Barbara).

A fast-paced story with a strong female lead.

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The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion by Fannie Flagg ****

Charminghistorical novel about the WASPs who ferried aircraft during World War II and were then forgotten for thirty years. Two timelines: Mrs. Earle Poole, Jr., known to her friends as Sookie, from Alabama, following the marriages of her three daughters, 2004. Fritzi Willinka Jurdabralinski, from Pulaski Wisconsin, during World War II. Sookie’s mother Lenore Simmons Krackenberry is a dominating Southern matriarch, straight out of Gone with the Wind. Fritzi is the eldest of four sisters, who find their wings when all the boys go off to war. A heart-warming, empowering story of how white women roles change from 1940 to 2010.

 The story takes off when Sookie discovers that she was adopted. Her real birth certificate reveals her to be nine months older and Fritzi is her mother. “Earle, do you know what that means? Oh, my God. I’m sixty years old! Oh, my God—I’m older than you are!” “I’ve been a card-carrying member of the Daughters of the Confederacy since I was sixteen, and I’m not even a Southerner. I’m a Yankee.” Throughout the book, Sookie struggles with nature versus nurture. All her life she felt trapped by her genetics and the expectations of her mother. Part of the story is her journey to discover who she is and break free of her upbringing.

In contrast, the four Jurdabralinski sisters are not trapped by expectations. First, when the men in the family leave, they take over the family business Wink’s Phillip 66 filling station. They run the station 24/7 doing everything from cleaning windows and pumping gas to changing tires and services engines. They are audacious and wildly successful. During the war, they all fly aircraft in the WASPs. Here again, they do a great job and have a good time doing it. However, it is still the 1940s and women have a long way to go. The women faced prejudice as WASP pilots from training through when they were disbanded and unceremoniously kicked out without credit or benefits. They also faced harassment, rape, and murder.

The book presents an idyllic view of life in Alabama and Wisconsin, idealizing the white Southern lifestyle and history, and small-town Wisconsin. Interestingly, for a book set in Alabama from1940 to 2010, there are no Blacks, and a single Mexican (domestic), Conchita. The book is a heart-warming story that rings a bit off in contemporary America.

A positive story of white women’s progress over seventy years, skipping over the intervening years.

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Murder at the Pentagon by Margaret Truman ***

Murder at the Pentagon (Captial Crimes #11/31) starts with the murder of DARPA scientist Dr. Richard Joycelen. Immediately the murderer, Captain Robert Cobol, is arrested for the crime. Our protagonist, Major Margit Falk, lawyer and helicopter pilot, is ordered to defend Cobol, but the case is quickly closed when Cobol commits suicide. The book explores the size of the military budget, arms dealers, and the 1992 concerns about women in combat and homosexuals in the military. While the book is generally a fast-paced thriller, it regularly takes time out for long political speeches. The plot is predictable.

 This book includes one of my pet peeves. The antagonist is a cabal of bureaucrats and criminals who are willing to murder anyone who gets in their way, along with innocent bystanders. A ruthless, brutally evil force. However, for no rhyme or reason, our protagonist is immune to their retribution. These cold-blooded killers ignore our protagonist. Early in the book, she appears to be in jeopardy, but it turns out that the apparent risk just vaporizes without explanation.

 Similarly, the mystery begins with two murder weapons, but one just fades away.

 The book is a collection of intriguing set-pieces, thrilling in the moment, but do not hold together with the overall plot.  Part of the way the author deals with these inconsistencies is by ending with an ambiguous epilog.

 A fast-paced, predictable murder mystery with heavy-handed politics.

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The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone ***

The WomanWho Smashed Codes or The System That Smashed Women is ostensibly a biography of the premier World War II code breaker in the U.S. She is the American version of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park. Only you’ve never heard of her: Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892-1980). This book is the depressing story of how this brilliant woman was dominated, used, suppressed, and erased. When you ask Google for the Elizebeth Friedman movie, you get the Alan Turing movie. So little of her remains in the historical record, that much of her biography does not even mention her.

Assuming you believe that women deserve credit for their contributions, you might wonder who the culprit for her fate is. The book presents two. One explicit and the other implicit. The book makes a lengthy and direct case against J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI (1935-1977), especially for his activities during WWII and the McCarthy era directly following. His faults are well documented and Elizebeth was only one of many victims.

From the beginning of her professional life to her death, her worse enemy was herself. She consistently put her husband and everyone else ahead of herself. In their early work, she gave him the credit to assure that he wouldn’t feel bad because she was smarter or because she received more praise and attention.  This pattern continued all the way to the end of her life when she cataloged and organized the records of his life, while just taking her records and throwing them in boxes. She was raised to think of everyone before herself, and she did.

Some of her invisibility was due to circumstances. While doing essentially the same work as Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, he worked in Europe and she worked in the Americas. The war in Europe got many more headlines than the conflict in the Americas. Of course, the entire field of cryptanalysis (aka codebreaking) never received the credit it was due. Recall that Alan Turing, for all his contribution to the war effort and Computer Science, was rewarded with chemical castration for being gay, followed by his suicide.

Aside from Elizebeth’s biography, the book celebrates codebreaking from a time when clever people broke code with pencil and paper. The history covers the bootleggers during prohibition and the Nazi efforts in South America during WWII.

A depressing book of a brilliant woman born a century too early.

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The Ariadne Connection by Sara Stamey ****

The Arianne Connection by Sara Stamey offers the perfect catastrophic storm: a pandemic and a reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles. Contemporary readers will be familiar with pandemics, but the pole reversal, which happens only a handful of times per million years, is a novel disaster. This book artfully explores the vulnerabilities of our high-tech infrastructures that are so dependent on electromagnetic signals.

In addition to these competing end-of-the-world scenarios, the book presents multiple rogue forces battling with each other to be the last group standing when nothing remains.

Our heroine is Ariadne, a scientist and a mystical healer, caught between her scientific dependence on empirical data, and her apparent ability to channel healing to and from the earth (Gaea). Will science or myth cure the people of plague and Gaea from the magnetic cataclysm?

 An action pack, cinematic, fast-paced thriller of science and mythology.

Seeing a Large Cat by Elizabeth Peters (Barbara Mertz Ph.D.) ***

Seeing a Large Cat (#9) is a mystery set in 1903 Egypt. The mystery involves an undiscovered burial chamber which contains a mummy who turns out to be Colonel Bellingham’s missing wife—presumed to be murdered by the man who kidnapped her, Dutton Scudder. The mystery is a small part of the story which centers on the assorted romances. The author has a Ph.D. in Egyptian Archeology and it shows.

The narrator (Amelia Peabody Emerson) is smitten with her archeologist husband. She often sounds like a teenager with a crush describing his physical, intellectual, and social traits. Their son (Walter Peabody “Ramses” Emerson) and adopted daughter (Nefret Emerson) can’t decide whether they are going to fall in love or not, but the adults expect they will eventually. Donald and Enid Fraser are going through a rough patch. He has compensated by falling in love with the ancient Egyptian princess Tasherit summoned by Mrs. Whitney-Jones. The marriage is saved with a clever twist. Mr. Cyrus Vandergelt eventually marries Mrs. Whitney Jones.

Series should probably be read in order.

A historical romance set in 1903 Egypt with a murder.

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