While helping their grandfather prepare for Greenfield's Winter Festival, the Alden children uncover a mystery surrounding the statue in the town square.
Boyd's ninth novel, an absorbing historical thriller, is loosely based on the history of a covert branch of British intelligence created to coax America into the Second World War. The story unfolds on parallel tracks as Sally Gilmartin, born Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigree recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939, reveals her clandestine past in an autobiography that she gives to her daughter, Ruth, a graduate student and single mother living a dull civilian life in Oxford in 1976.
Something weird is going on! Ms. LaGrange talks funny, and she's from some other country called France! She thinks the vomitorium is a fancy restaurant! Plus she's writing secret messages in the mashed potatoes. Ms. LaGrange is the weirdest lunch lady in the history of the world!
As a child, former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone was told that his father died in a submarine disaster in the North Atlantic. But what he now learns stuns him: His father’s sub was a secret nuclear vessel lost on a highly classified mission beneath the ice shelves of Antarctica.
Mrs. Cooney, the school nurse, is a knockout — and A.J. has a crush on her! But are her charms just a cover for her secret identity as an international spy? Will A.J.'s love for Mrs. Cooney win out over his love for the good old USA?