The Librarian's Guide to Espionage (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781837008728)

The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel meets The Alice Network. Inspired by the true story of Florence Mendheim, a real New York librarian who spent years attending Nazi rallies undercover.

Betty Mannheim has three problems: she's thirty-one, unmarried, and her mother won't let her forget either. She also has a fourth problem, which her mother doesn't know about. Betty is spying on Nazis.

New York City, 1936. When a mysterious stranger walks into Betty's library branch in Washington Heights and asks her to attend a Friends of New Germany rally as undercover agent Gertrude Mueller, Betty does something she's never done before: she says yes. Not because she isn't afraid. Because she's more afraid of spending the rest of her life eating spaetzle on the covered couch.

So begins Betty's double life--sitting in rooms full of people who want her dead while her matchmaker lines up surgeons, her mother works herself into a compress-on-the-head frenzy, and Betty discovers she's rather good at lying, self-defence, and falling for the wrong man.

Inspired by the true story of the Jewish spy networks that monitored Nazi activity on American soil in the 1930s, a novel about a woman who was told to stay in the lines--and chose, very quietly, to blow them up.