The Traitor Beside Her

Evans follows up The Physicists’ Daughter with a lackluster second thriller featuring factory worker Justine Byrne. In 1944, U.S. Army Intelligence recruits Justine to Virginia’s Arlington Hall, a women’s college that’s been transformed into an American code-breaking facility. Despite her gifts for cryptanalysis, Justine’s handler, Paul, hasn’t stationed her there to crack enemy messages—he’s certain that Arlington Hall has been infiltrated by an enemy agent who has already disrupted the Allied war efforts and caused several deaths, and he wants her to ferret out the traitor. That traitor may also be responsible for the strangulation of a woman working for the head of the German code-cracking division. Justine’s mole hunt, interspersed with her fending off unwelcome suitors as she embarks on a relationship with Paul, packs a certain amount of inherent drama, but it’s largely undone by thin characters and purple prose (“Justine would always wonder if anyone saw her face when the first light of realization began to dawn”). Maisie Dobbs this is not. Agent: Anne Hawkins, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)