“The Queen's Accomplice” - Susan Elia MacNeal
(Maggie Hope book 6)
🩸Given her history of undertaking risky wartime assignments, Maggie Hope must have chaffed while relegated to tea service while the SOE bigwigs debated the “Female Problem” presented by increasing numbers of female agents. There was also the matter of their meager pay compared to their male counterparts and the absence of a pension for the women operatives on the basis that they had fathers or husbands to provide for them. MacNeal provides historical insight on the back-and-forth of the official government position on women in the SOE and behind enemy lines.
🩸TQA contains multiple swirling plot lines across a number of settings: Ravensbrück labor camp, Berlin, SOE Finishing School, London, and somewhere in occupied France. In London, Maggie must apprehend a vicious serial killer with a nasty grudge - blaming the surge of women in the workforce for his own shortcomings. Meanwhile, Maggie’s half sister, Elise Hess is a political prisoner and former resistance worker whom the British government is working to extricate. Finally, Maggie’s dancer friend Sarah and Hugh (recall from book 2) prep for their first overseas mission as SOE agents.
🩸 Side note: I love how the character of David is immediately recognizable with his mythological exclamations (e.g. “merciful Minerva” and “hankering Hades”). It’s fun to see what MacNeal comes up with for him.
🩸In TQA, Maggie has to deal with a creep of the highest order: an entitled, misogynist cretin. Fear not, she handles him ably, but what of women who don’t have Maggie’s SOE skull-cracking abilities? This part of the story raised the question of why women felt they needed to invent a boyfriend or a husband just because an aggressive man would respect the fiction but not the woman standing before them. Since the 1940s not much has changed as women still tip-toe through daily life on the alert for a man exactly like this one, who’ll deliberately misconstrue even polite small talk.
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