"Mrs. Pollifax is sent on a safari to smoke out an international assassin whose next target is the president of Zambia. 'Just take a lot of pictures of everyone on that safari,' the CIA man told her. 'One of them has to be our man.' It sounded simple enough. But it wasn't. Because shortly after she started taking pictures, someone stole her film. And right after that she was kidnapped by Rhodesian terrorists. And right after that--well, read for yourself..."...

"At eighteen, Alexandra Wickham is presented to King George V and Queen Mary in an exquisite white lace and satin dress her mother has ordered from Paris. With her delicate blond looks, she is a stunning beauty who seems destined for a privileged life. But fate, a world war, and her own quietly rebellious personality lead her down a different path. By 1939, Europe is on fire and England is at war. From her home in idyllic Hampshire, Alex makes her...

"Upon its creation in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency instantly became one of the most important spy services in the world. Like every male-dominated workplace in Eisenhower America, the growing intelligence agency needed women to type memos, send messages, manipulate expense accounts, and keep secrets. Despite discrimination-even because of it-these clerks and secretaries rose to become some of the shrewdest, toughest operatives the agency...

"In 1942 the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To "set Europe ablaze," in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive had to do something unprecedented: recruit women as spies. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and their families to become saboteurs in France. They destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial...

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly...

"It's 1947 and American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a fervent belief that her beloved French cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive somewhere. So when Charlie's family banishes her to Europe to have her 'little problem' taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London determined to find...

In 1941 Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, lifelong rebel against her country's conservative, patriarchal society, became the leader of a vast intelligence organization. Her group's name was Alliance, and used the names of animals as their aliases. Fourcade was Hedgehog: a tough little animal, unthreatening in appearance. The Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents. Captured twice by the...

Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government, a situation that is compromised when she falls in love with him.

Time magazine called her "the Mata Hari of Minnesota"; OSS Chief general "Wild Bill" Donovan called her "the greatest unsung heroine of the war." But for decades, the extent of Betty Pack's achievements as an agent during World War II, first for Britain's MI6 and then for America's OSS, remained classified. Now, the truth about this femme fatale--her dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions, the heartaches that haunted her life, her vital contributions...