[811] Mrs. Roosevelt’s Confidante – Susan Elia MacNeal

Maggie Hope’s Mystery #5

“She had returned to the United States hoping to find out where she belonged—the United States or the United Kingdom. But now I struck her that a woman without a country, without a husband, without parents, and without religion was in the perfect position to be a spy. To be on her own, not answering to anyone.” (Ch.20, 316)

The fifth installment in the series takes Maggie Hope back to her native country. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States has finally joined the war effort in December 1941. In the entourage of Winston Churchill, she returns to America, where she comes to work closely with Elanor Roosevelt after the mysterious death of the First Lady’s personal secretary, Blanche Belfour.

Within the frame of this book, the murder of Blanche’s murder takes priority over the unstable and urgent political situation at large. Whoever behind the murder is determined to incriminate Elanor Roosevelt, to discredit her, and to poison the country with a scandal in the White House on the verge of war. Maggie is quickly drawn into Eleanor’s confidence in order to track down the murderer.

Within the story were days leading up to the scheduled execution of Wendell Cotton, a black tenant accused of killing his white landlord, but out of self-defense. It’s not difficult to put two and two together as Maggie becomes more involved in advocating for the suspension of death penalty. The First Lady is a target of incrimination because of her support for minority and civil rights. Wendell comes to personify all those to whom democracy is denied. Deprived of a fair trial, he really embodies the deep-seated racial and economic injustice that poisoned the society then and now.

Meanwhile, imprisoned in a Tudor mansion where conversations are under surveillance, Clara Hess talks of German rock installation. John Sterling, the ex-RAF pilot, becomes involved in Hollywood commissioned propaganda.

The social fabric is very rich, redolent of details in the White House ministrations and the President’s own secret agent. But Maggie Hope, again, is marginalized and she is involved in no more than a murder investigation that amounts not much to a mystery. The perpetrator has been explicitly stated out front so there isn’t a mystery. In this book social commentary preponderates over Maggie’s assignment. There’s the moral question of colonization: nothing Hitler does is worse than what the Brits did to the natives of its colonies when acquiring them. And how is it that white Americans can become so incensed over the ousting and purging of Jews in Europe and yet not the ousting and purging of blacks in their homeland? Such social critique is what makes the book so engrossing.

319 pp. Bantam Books. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]