The Paris Assignment by Rhys Bowen
What's It About?
A courageous wife, mother, and resister confronts the devastation of World War II in a heartbreaking and hopeful novel by the bestselling author of The Venice Sketchbook and The Tuscan Child.
A romantic meeting at the Sorbonne in Paris 1931 sets British student Madeleine Grant off on a life adventure equal parts heartache and heroism in The Paris Assignment by bestselling author Rhys Bowen.
Madeleine meets Giles Martin a month after beginning French language studies at the prestigious university and falls easily for his gracious charm and focused attentions. Their brief romance is interrupted by Madeleine’s return to London at the end of the university term, but Giles vows they will see each other again…love cannot be conquered. When Madeleine returns to the London home she shares with her complacent father and overbearing stepmother, memories of her French mother and Giles’s handsome face urge her to return to the city of light.
The breezy romance of the young students gets a sharp dose of reality, as Madeleine realizes Giles is an enigma to her, “at one moment a dedicated Communist, talking passionately about justice for all men, overthrow of corrupt governments, and at the same time a devout Catholic.” [38] Helping her through this confusing period is Madeleine’s great aunt Janine, or “Tante Janine,” as Madeleine calls her, the aunt of her beloved mother, Louise. When Madeleine learns she is pregnant after three months with Giles, both must make tough decisions on whether love is enough. Defiant, the two lovers wed, and Giles becomes a “rising star of the left wing” [47] whose journalism takes him all over the country on fact-finding missions while Madeleine cares for their son, Olivier.
Eight years pass quickly in Bowen’s telling, until Britain and France declare war on Germany in September 1939. Giles sends Madeleine and Olivier back to London for safekeeping, and Giles goes underground to serve the French Resistance when Hitler rolls through France unopposed. But Bowen serves up a cruel twist of fate that separates mother and son, and Madeleine is targeted by England’s war ministry for a position as a courier and spy because she can speak French fluently. Having lost contact with Giles (and now her son), Madeleine is overcome with grief and rage, blown by the winds of war into situations of heart stopping danger and despairing loneliness.
NONSTOP ROLLERCOASTER RIDE OF EMOTION
The strength of the book lies in the alternating POVs of Madeleine and Oliver (now Anglicized from Olivier) as their adventures take them further apart: Madeleine becomes a trainee with the “Baker Street Irregulars” whose commandant believes that “women make the best spies,” [131] and Oliver is packed off to an Australian orphanage by well-meaning but obtuse officials who are unaware of a mix-up with Oliver’s name. Madeleine survives the intensive Baker Street Irregular training and returns to France with a burning in her belly: “she wanted to live, to make the Germans pay for what they had done to her son,” [139] which keeps the reader engaged knowing something she does not. But life as a courier and spy deep in enemy-held France raises moral conundrums for Madeleine when one of her actions indirectly causes a civilian’s death:
If she passed along a message to the Resistance and they used her information to destroy German equipment, bomb a railway line, steal ammunition, ordinary people like that poor man would be punished instead. How could that be right? How could she justify what she was doing? She tried to tell herself that it was a war … that’s just how it was. And if you thought too much, you’d go mad. [233-34]
Madeleine’s exploits with other female recruits and friends behind enemy lines bring them danger close to the Nazi menace, and not everyone will come out alive…or unchanged, including Madeleine. Bowen’s story sweeps up the reader on a nonstop rollercoaster ride of action, espionage, heartbreaking sacrifice, revenge, and reunions both joyful and painful that should come as no surprise to fans of her work. While one of the plot points requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, it does not detract from the novel’s overall satisfying message of love lost and regained in the fiery crucible of World War II.
About the author:
Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of two historical mystery series as well as several internationally bestselling historical novels, two of which were nominated for Edgar Award
Rhys was born in Bath, England and educated at London University but now divides her time between California and Arizona. Her books have been nominated for every major mystery award and she has won twenty of them to date, including five Agathas.
She currently writes two historical mystery series, each very different in tone. The Molly Murphy mysteries feature an Irish immigrant woman in turn-of-the-century New York City. These books are multi-layered, complex stories with a strong sense of time and place and have won many awards including Agatha and Anthony. There are 19 books so far in this series plus three Kindle stories, Rhys’s daughter, Clare Broyles, now cowrites the series with her
Then there is Lady Georgie, She’s 35th in line to the throne of England, but she’s flat broke and struggling to survive in the Great Depression. These books are lighter and funnier than Molly’s adventures. They poke gentle fun at the British class system–about which Rhys knows a lot, having married into an upper class family rather like Georgie’s.
As a child Rhys spent time with relatives in Wales. Those childhood experiences colored her first mystery series, about Constable Evans in the mountains of Snowdonia.
Her books have been translated into over 30 languages
