“Brace yourself for adventure, intrigue, and espionage! Inspired by the true story of the world’s most notorious and storied Soviet female spy, The Undercover Bookshop is a gripping page-turner of a novel.”
When given an advance copy of Katherine Reay’s The Undercover Bookshop, I wrote the above with great enthusiasm, yet a blurb never captures the true essence of one’s relationship with a story.
In this novel, Reay, author of A Shadow in Moscow and The Berlin Letters, returns to the Cold War and the spies who worked in the shadows. This time, she shifts her focus from the spy as her central figure to a young woman looking for anything but intrigue.
After a tumultuous childhood during World War II, Reay’s heroine, Gemma Brown, yearns for a new start and the security of consistency and home. Viewing events through Gemma’s lens, Reay balances a riveting spy story with a coming-of-age tale, a love story, and an homage to the classic British mystery novels Gemma adores.
Answering a newspaper advertisement, Gemma moves to the village of Great Rollright in the English Cotswolds to work as a shopkeeper and establish the village’s first bookshop. Fitting in proves difficult as Gemma finds she is more adept at solving mysteries than baking cakes or grasping social niceties.
Nevertheless, she finds a friend in Peggy, another recent transplant, and Ursula Beurton, not only the village’s best baker, but an enigmatic figure who sparks controversy and small-town gossip.
Gemma’s observant eye soon catches inconsistencies and oddities within Ursula’s behavior, however. Is her imagination running wild, or could Ursula really be a spy? With Peggy as her trusty sidekick (and with secrets of her own), Gemma and the story are off and running.
Reay picks up the pace, and the reader finds this cozy tale – full of village life, new friendships, and budding romance – pivoting into an international game of cat-and-mouse involving MI5 and the KGB.
As in her previous spy novels, Reay pens fiction grounded in extensive research and real-life details regarding the Soviet Union’s most famous female spy, Ursula Kuczynski Beurton, meaning one should venture into the Author’s Note only after turning the final page of her novel.
The Undercover Bookshop is a delightful read that, as The Alice Network author Kate Quinn stated, “feels like a warm, possibly arsenic-laced hug straight from Agatha Christie.”
Reay will be Georgia Writers Museum’s Meet the Author presenter Nov. 3, with doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a 7 p.m. program start. Tickets are $45 each or $40 each for two or more, and each includes a themed, gourmet meal. Visit Georgia Writers Museum at georgiawritersmuseum. org to register.
Marie Bostwick is a New York Times
and USA Today bestselling author of more than 20 works of contemporary and historical fiction.