Maggie Hope

Maggie Hope is the protagonist of Susan Elia MacNeal's historical mystery series — a British-American mathematician and cryptographer who begins the series as Winston Churchill's secretary during the London Blitz and whose intelligence and determination draw her into increasingly dangerous wartime missions. MacNeal writes the World War II home front and espionage world with meticulous historical research, and Maggie's red hair and mathematical mind give her a specific character in the period's very particular milieu.

The series follows Maggie across the war years and across different locations — London, Scotland, Paris, Rome — as her work for British intelligence and her personal losses shape her from a brilliant civilian into a more hardened participant in the war's secret dimensions. Each novel is grounded in specific historical events of the period.

MacNeal's particular strength is her integration of the domestic and the political — Maggie's female perspective on a war that involved women in unprecedented ways, and the specific experience of living through the Blitz and its aftermath, give the series a historical specificity that purely military fiction cannot access.

Begin with Mr. Churchill's Secretary (2012) and read in order.