Speakeasy

February 12, 2018
Intriguing characters and an unusual setting lift this appealing debut novel from Canadian author Smith (Plenty:
A Year of Eating on the 100-Mile Diet). During WWII, 30-year-old Lena Stillman, a Canadian government code breaker, deciphers Japanese military communications; a few years earlier, she was part of a gang of bank robbers led by charismatic psychopath Bill Bagley, her former lover. She fears that her past is catching up with her as Bill starts sending messages to her from his cell on death row. Alternating with Lena’s story are chapters set during the early 1930s narrated by Byron Godfrey, another former gang member who was shaken out of a dull, law-abiding life by Bill. Their adventures, especially in the Canadian backwoods, are both upsetting and exhilarating, just as Lena and Byron show themselves to be simultaneously guilty and innocent. If things don’t work out for them quite as expected, that’s part of the book’s naïve charm. Agent: John Pearce, Westwood Creative Arts (Canada).

February 1, 2018
Smith's debut novel jumps between two quite different plotlines: during WWII, math whiz Lena Stillman is working as a code breaker in British Columbia, monitoring radio traffic from the Japanese. Unbeknownst to her colleagues, Lena has a criminal past. In the 1930s, she fell in love with a notorious bank robber, Bill Bagley, and became part of his gang, serving as getaway driver as the crew staged multiple holdups in Canada and Washington State. Now Bagley has been captured and sentenced to death, but Lena has been receiving cryptic messages from him, suggesting that, if she doesn't aid in his efforts to obtain a pardon, he will expose her past. The action jumps somewhat awkwardly between the Bonnie-and-Clyde story and an espionage plot at the code breakers' compound, a North American version of Bletchley Park. Although there is naturally more action in the bank-robbing story, the WWII drama proves far more involving, as Smith provides crisp detail about the code breakers' work and vividly describes the remote Canadian backdrop. A disjointed but still satisfying historical thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)