Louise's Crossing

March 11, 2019
Set in February 1944, Shaber’s satisfying seventh WWII mystery (after 2016’s Louise’s Lies) finds Louise Pearlie, an employee of the Office of Strategic Services, on her way from Washington, D.C., to her new assignment in the London office, aboard the SS Amelia Earhart. Some of the other passengers have sailed on the ship before, among them a woman whose husband drowned on a trip three months earlier. Though it was ruled a suicide, shipboard gossips believe it was murder. When another passenger dies, Louise investigates and concludes that the two deaths may be related. The book’s main pleasure lies in the authentic details that depict Louise’s cultural, social, and physical world. Hardships such as food rationing are made real, as are the hazards of travel during the war, like U-boats. Shaber also addresses casual racism in the case of a “colored” stewardess, who expresses her desire to move to Britain to escape the segregation that exists in the U.S. This well researched novel provides insights above and beyond the crimes and their motives. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary.

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.

April 1, 2019
The seventh Louise Pearlie WWII mystery finds the OSS clerk onboard a ship en route from America to England in February 1944. The war is still raging, and no Atlantic voyage can be considered safe, but Louise remains hopeful of a peaceful crossing, a lull between her hectic job back home and her new posting in London. But when rumors surrounding an apparent onboard suicide morph into a real murder case, Louise realizes she has a killer to catch. The Louise Pearlie series has steadily improved over the years, and historical-mystery readers who have not yet checked it out should be encouraged to give it a try (all the installments function fine as stand-alones). This entry, in particular, is a cracking-good read, a genuinely suspenseful mystery set against a vividly realized WWII backdrop, laced with plenty of shipboard suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)