This book by Susan Elia MacNeal is the 6th in a series featuring cryptographer and MI 5 spy Maggie Hope. There are 4 subsequent books in the series so I jumped in right at the middle. I will definitely go back and read from the first one, Mr. Churchill's Secretary. In this book, set in 1942 London, the Blitz has finally stopped and Maggie finds herself cooling her heels as a receptionist in the office of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) until she is summoned by a former co-worker at MI 5 to help solve a series of murders. The killer is re-creating the murders of Jack the Ripper and targeting young women who have come to London to be interviewed by the SOE for possible insertion into occupied France. Maggie is already furious that women spies are paid a fraction of what men doing the same work receive, and, because the use of women spies is very hush hush and not covered by the Geneva Convention, they are not acknowledged officially when they die and their families are not compensated as the men's families are. But she can make no headway with the pompous men who send these young women out to their dangerous assignments. Having, apparently, a cozy relationship with the Queen, however, may make it possible to redress the issue. How much worse, then, for some misogynistic man to start murdering these women on their home turf. She gets paired up with with DCI James Durgin of Scotland Yard and they each begin to gradually appreciate the other's unique strengths. Durgin has years of experience that inform his "gut feelings" and Maggie is a maths prodigy who can see patterns in seemingly random data. They make an interesting team that will be sure to continue into future installments.
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