Alors

As evidenced in a movie I recently watched, everyone romanticizes an era from the past. For some it's the Belle Époque. For some it's the Roaring Twenties. For me, I've always been fascinated by the era captured in Simon Mawer's book Trapeze.  

As the book opens, a plane is flying over rural France. A young woman waits her turn to parachute into the darkness. Her real name is Marian Sutro. Having learned French from her mother and British English from her father, she has been tapped for a special mission involving an old family friend living in Paris. Having shed the security of her identity as Marian at the border, she must juggle aliases, relay messages, and otherwise pass through the streets of heavily check-pointed Paris undetected. 

Will she succeed? Will she survive? It's not only Marian, but the reader, who anxiously asks these questions.  Regardless of whether Marian in the end is successful, Trapeze, in effortlessly capturing the suspense and suspicion of the time, accomplishes its mission.