Real-life double agent Elizabeth Bentley had a long career spying for the Soviet Union and then informing for the FBI. In her compelling eighth novel, A Most Clever Girl, Stephanie Marie Thornton (The Conqueror's Wife) unravels the threads of Bentley's story, examining her reasons for joining the Communist Party and the complex life--love, grief and purpose--she had as a spy.
Thornton begins her story with Catherine Gray, a young woman who shows up on Elizabeth's doorstep holding a gun and seeking answers about her own past. As Elizabeth tells her story--slowly and deliberately, despite the gun and Catherine's impatience--readers get a glimpse into the life of a lonely young woman in postwar New York. Elizabeth takes Catherine through her early days in the Party, her transfer to the organization's elite underground (which required severing those early ties with comrades), and her longtime romance with her handler, Jacob Golos. Like Elizabeth, the book's narrative rambles a bit, but eventually picks up speed as Elizabeth is forced to make difficult decisions about her life and the lives of other Party informants.
Thornton's eye for historical detail takes her characters from seedy street corners to innocuous Manhattan restaurants and eventually to the courtroom, as Elizabeth testifies before the FBI and exposes some of her former colleagues. Twisty and well plotted, A Most Clever Girl touches on the moral complexity of Elizabeth's actions, but is first and foremost a chance for a much-maligned woman to tell her story. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams