Transcription

There's a murky noirness about wartime London that intrigues me and spy fiction from that period has become one of my favourite genres.  On the brink of World War 2, when the threat of fascism was pervasive, eighteen year old Juliet Armstrong is recruited as a transcriptionist, a job that she finds mundane. She proves herself to be smart and adaptable and is then tasked with infiltrating a group of British upper class housewife nazi sympathizers. That segment ends and we rejoin Juliet after the war. She now works for the BBC as a producer of boring children's history shows which she tries to enliven. Her past as a spy and the acts she performed for the war effort come back to haunt her. She feels threatened - is her fear rational or is she paranoid? This is not a thriller. At the outset Juliet is an intelligent lonely teenager who is looking for romance and develops a crush on her handsome but crushingly boring boss. She likes to drink and gossip with her workmates. Eventually she finds that some of her actions have consequences. The book is atmospheric and clever with a bit of suspense thrown in from time to time to keep it interesting. I liked it very much.