(series intro) A brilliant codebreaker, top of her graduate class, Maggie Hope was nonetheless relegated to secretarial duties in wartime London—until an assignment at No. 10 Downing Street, working for Winston Churchill himself, affords Maggie access to the highest levels of government, and a chance to use her talents for the Allied cause. Susan Elia MacNeal's Barry Award-winning historical series (further nominated for Agatha, Macavity, and Edgar Awards) is inspired by the real-life secretaries and spies who worked for Britain's SOE in World War II. (individual blurb) World War II has come home to Britain in 1941, but it takes more than nightly air raids to rattle Maggie Hope. In her third book, after serving as an undercover agent to protect Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, Maggie is now an elite member of the Special Operations Executive—the first female agent to be dropped behind enemy lines, to infiltrate the Nazi capital and the heart of the German war machine. Moving in the highest levels of Berlin society, gathering information to pass on to London HQ, she uncovers secrets that expose a darker, more inhuman side of the war—and of her own family heritage.