(See all my Book Reviews and Author Interviews) – Susan Elia MacNeal is the author of more than 10 novels. I had the opportunity to interview Ms. MacNeil in 2021. The Last Hope was published last month and is the 11th book in her Maggie Hope series. It is the 49th book I completed reading in 2024.
I received an ARC of this book through https://www.netgalley.com with the expectation of a fair and honest review. Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own! Due to scenes of violence, I categorize this novel as R.
The story begins in January 1944. Many ranking German military officers have already concluded that the war is lost. Heinrich Himmler initiates a plan with General Walter Schellenberg to approach the British and negotiate a separate peace agreement. Schellenberg uses well-known French “horizontal collaborator” Coco Chanel and her many British contacts to facilitate a meeting. Chanel passes a message to the British that she wants a meeting and asks for Paige Kelly to be there.
Kelly is a persona that Maggie Hope had taken on a few years earlier when she was in Paris for the SOE. Hope began in 1940 as a typist for Winston Churchill. She found her way into the SOE and learned her spy craft well. She has been with the SOE for a few years. She has served behind the lines in France, and has earned the rank of Major. She is determined to see the Allies win the war.
She is called to a meeting by Kim Philby of MI-6. He makes her aware of the message from Chanel. Philby wants her to go to Madrid to meet Chanel, but only as a cover. The hidden mission will be to find and assassinate Dr. Werner Heisenberg, a leader in the Nazi nuclear program. He will be speaking in Madrid at the same time as the meeting with Chanel. Hope agrees but has deep reservations about simply killing Heisenberg.
Hope wants to meet and talk with Heisenberg. She needs to know that Heisenberg’s death is really interrupting the German effort to build an atomic bomb. As Hope flies to Lisbon and travels on to Madrid, she is surrounded by intrigue and danger. She is understandably upset when death touches some of those around her. She soon realizes that not only must she be conscious of German intelligence agents but also British double agents that support communist Russia. A party that most certainly does not want the Germans to sign a separate peace.
I enjoyed the 8+ hours I spent reading this 293-page WWII-era tale of intrigue. I have had the opportunity to read a few other of Ms. MacNeal’s novels, such as Prisoner in the Castle, The King’s Justice, The Hollywood Spy, and Mother Daughter Traitor Spy. All have been consistently good reads. I give this novel a rating of 4 out of 5.
My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).
If you have an interest in the WWII era of history, you may find these three pages of interest.
The “About WWII” page is a collection of links to posts that I have made over the years that are relevant to WWII. Included are links to many fiction and non-fiction books on WWII that I have read and reviewed. There are also links to WWII oriented podcasts.
The “World War II Resources” page is a constantly growing collection of more than 620 links to museums, memorials, websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and other sources with information on the World War II era in history.
The “World War II Timeline” page expands frequently and shows events leading up to WWII, as well as during the war. Events are broken down into the Pacific and European Theaters by date.
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