The little-known true story of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the woman who headed the largest spy network in occupied France during World War II, from the bestselling author of Citizens of London and Last Hope Island.
... incredibly absorbing and long-overdue ... This masterfully told true story reads like fiction and will appeal to readers who devour WWII thrillers à la Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale (2015).
Lynne Olson, who has written widely about Allied efforts during the war, turns a long-overdue spotlight on Fourcade in a tense new page-turner...Olson’s research is comprehensive, her writing crackling, and her story astonishing. She is wise enough to get out of the way of her compelling material, but also to shape it so that the Alliance’s complicated exploits are clear and the dozens of players in the story, many with one or more code names, can be kept straight. The book is war history, to be sure, but also an astute character portrait and a study in management and persistence under harrowing circumstances ...
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War” manages in spots to be a little dull. The writing is clear, detailed and reminiscent of your high school history textbook. As the names and places and dates whizzed past, I was left hungry for a more fully dimensional, complex portrait of the woman behind the tough-cookie persona. It is possible to devote 400 pages to someone and still leave their character feeling underdeveloped ... None of which is to devalue the broader contributions of the author or her subject ... Brava to Lynne Olson for a biography that should challenge any outdated assumptions about who deserves to be called a hero.
