An Unlikely Spy

April 1, 2021
The intriguing story of a young woman's espionage career during World War II weaves in a critique of the British class system. What sort of people got recruited to be spies by Britain's famed MI5 intelligence agency during World War II? This absorbing historical novel makes clear they weren't much like James Bond. Evelyn Varley is a restless young woman living in London in 1939, working for a cosmetics company and making no use at all of her Oxford degree in German, when she's invited for a rather mysterious job interview. She rapidly goes from typing up reports to infiltrating a group of Nazi sympathizers--and discovering a disturbing personal connection. Starford takes an interesting tack with Evelyn's background. The daughter of a clerk and a homemaker, she attended a posh boarding school as a scholarship girl, which meant she would either suffer bullies or remake herself in the images of the upper-class girls who harassed her. She chose the latter and did it so well she got into Oxford and became a sort of second daughter to the family of her best friend, Sally--a family that's one of the wealthiest in England. When Evelyn goes to work for MI5, she discovers others who, like her, are outsiders in the rigid British class system but have found ways to assimilate by assuming an identity, an essential part of spycraft. As the war looms, the challenge for Evelyn is assimilating with people she finds abhorrent. Most of the novel is set in the years just before and after Britain's entry into the war. Occasional chapters flash-forward to 1948, when Evelyn is trying to put her life back together after some unnamed catastrophe and tentatively falling in love. The book is rich with historical details, right down to clothing styles and furnishings. The plot sometimes slows amid those details, but most of the book is well paced. The novel's depiction of Evelyn's career is exciting, but it also suggests the human cost: No matter how skilled her performances, to those above her in the social hierarchy, she's expendable. A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage's foundation in personal relationships.

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April 19, 2021
Class and ideologies collide in Starford’s consummate debut, a clever combination of home front drama and espionage thriller. A chance encounter at a London hotel in 1948 with an old boarding school friend sends heroine Evelyn Varney’s mind reeling back into her past
. At school, the charismatic Julia Wharton-Wells, a little older and from a higher class background, takes Evelyn under her wing. Evelyn then goes on to study German at Oxford, and when the war begins, she finds work at the War Office. Her ability to speak German brings her to the attention of MI5, whose Bennett White recruits her for a dangerous assignment to infiltrate a group of homegrown Nazi sympathizers known as the Lion Society. Evelyn can’t tell any of her friends of the role she’s undertaken, which has repercussions when she finds out that Julia’s lover might be a spy for Germany. Plot twist follows plot twist as Evelyn’s assignment forces her to confront multiple layers of betrayal and deception. The author does an excellent job of recreating London before, during, and after the war, and in Evelyn has created a complex heroine whose sense of duty gets her in way over her head. With suspense worthy of Hitchcock and a moral reckoning straight out of Le Carré or Graham Greene, this is a winner. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House.

May 1, 2021
It quickly dawned on scholarship girl Evelyn Varley that she needed to reinvent herself as a facsimile of the rich girls in control of her English boarding school. A natural chameleon, she does so quickly, her transformation leading to a place at Oxford and then, in 1939, with war looming, to an offer from MI5. Counterintelligence proves perfect for Evelyn, already a master at ""adopting the manners and attitudes of those around her."" Infiltrating a group of Nazi sympathizers determined to prepare the soil for Hitler's coming invasion, Evelyn is on a roll until she encounters people she knows within the group and feels the pain of trying to choose between friend and country. Jumping between 1940, with Evelyn in the midst of her crisis, and 1948, Starford builds suspense by showing us Evelyn in reduced circumstances but withholding how her character came to be there. WWII novels usually ignore the Phony War, before the Blitz, but Starford finds in that curious period of suspended animation a perfect setting for this subtle yet moving story of personal and professional camouflage, of hidden selves fearing the light.

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