The Librarian's Guide to Espionage

The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel meets The Alice Network. Inspired by the true story of Florence Mendheim, a real New York librarian who spent years attending Nazi rallies undercover.

Betty Mannheim has three problems: she's thirty-one, unmarried, and her mother won't let her forget either. She also has a fourth problem, which her mother doesn't know about. Betty is spying on Nazis.

New York City, 1936. When a mysterious stranger walks into Betty's library branch in Washington Heights and asks her to attend a Friends of New Germany rally as undercover agent Gertrude Mueller, Betty does something she's never done before: she says yes. Not because she isn't afraid. Because she's more afraid of spending the rest of her life eating spaetzle on the covered couch.

So begins Betty's double life—sitting in rooms full of people who want her dead while her matchmaker lines up surgeons, her mother works herself into a compress-on-the-head frenzy, and Betty discovers she's rather good at lying, self-defence, and falling for the wrong man.

Inspired by the true story of the Jewish spy networks that monitored Nazi activity on American soil in the 1930s, a novel about a woman who was told to stay in the lines—and chose, very quietly, to blow them up.