Louise's Dilemma

October 7, 2013
Set in 1943, Shaber’s mild third novel of suspense (after 2012’s Louise’s Gamble) takes widow Louise Pearlie from her desk at the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS in Washington, D.C., into the field. A censor has relayed to the OSS a postcard with a seemingly innocuous message. Written in English and mailed from occupied France via neutral Lisbon to a man in Maryland, it contains an American place name with a German spelling. Fearing it’s a coded communication, Louise’s bosses order her to take the obvious first step of interviewing the addressee, Leroy Martin, but her clueless and ham-fisted partner, Lt. Arthur Collins, makes her job harder. The inquiry later becomes a murder investigation. Louise is able to thwart a Nazi plot because the bad guy unwisely decides to spare her life. Series fans will appreciate the attention to period detail (e.g., the OSS’s filing system was devised by the Yale scholar who edited Horace Walpole’s letters). Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

October 1, 2013
A determined government employee follows her hunch, no matter the cost. A puzzling date and a smudge that might be an extra letter on a postcard mailed from Nazi-occupied France make intelligence analyst Louise Pearlie wonder if she's looking at a coded message rather than a harmless greeting. Although she's a mere office worker for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, she's excited to be temporarily assigned to the field with Lt. Arthur Collins. Together, they travel to St. Leonard, Md., to talk to the postcard's addressee, grumpy oysterman Leroy Martin, and his South African-born wife, Anne. Although the Martins can explain the card, Louise's report expresses so much unease that she's ordered back to the Martins' on a stakeout with FBI agent Gray Williams. After they watch Martin and another man smuggling a large, corpse-sized bundle from an abandoned tobacco barn near the Martins' property, they discover a grisly murder that steers the case in another direction. Louise, who can't drop the notion that the postcard contains a coded message, makes a third visit and a shocking discovery, earning praise for her persistence, if not her sense of self-preservation. Her conflict between duty and romance adds to the convincing combination of suspicion, privation and patriotism during the war years. A third adventure for Louise (Louise's Gamble, 2012, etc.) gets her away from her index cards and gives her confidence in her own judgment in Shaber's well-paced, almost plausible twist on history.

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October 1, 2013
The third Louise Pearlie novel finds the OSS file clerk (OSS being the WWII predecessor of the CIA) on a road trip. American intelligence has intercepted a postcard, sent from occupied France, to an address in Maryland. What appears to be botched spelling, plus some curious phrasing, leads investigators to wonder if there might be some sort of embedded code. Louise, in the company of a brash young intelligence agent, is sent to interview the postcard's intended recipients, to see if there's anything funny going on. She finds more than she bargained for. Louise is a strong series lead (her best friend, the wife of a German Luftwaffe pilot who is trying to stay under the radar so she isn't shipped off to a detention camp, is equally intriguing), and Shaber does a nice job of creating a WWII-era atmosphere without weighing readers down with too much period window dressing. A very good entry in this new and promising series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)