On my blog today, I’m hosting the Coffee Pot Book Club book tour for MARY ANNA EVANS, to share news of the recent publication of her novel, The Traitor Beside Her, the second of her Justine Byrne Historical Mysteries, set during the Second World War.

Below, you can read more about The Traitor Beside Her, learn the story behind the book, and find details of where to buy it.

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What is the book about?

“Evans’s characters are vividly drawn, elevating this story and its revelations about women’s little-celebrated contributions to the war effort.” — Washington Post

“An exciting read with historical tidbits, a hint of danger, and a touch of romance.”— Kirkus Reviews

The Traitor Beside Her is an intricately plotted WWII espionage novel weaving together mystery, action, friendship, and a hint of romance perfect for fans of The Rose Code and Code Name Helene.

Justine Byrne can’t trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women’s college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers.

Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn’t there to decipher German codes—she’s there to find a traitor.

Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, a fluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.

“A fascinating and intelligent WWII home front story.” — Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author, for The Physicists’ Daughter

Learn the story behind the book

The Story Behind The Traitor Beside Her

by Mary Anna Evans

My latest release, The Traitor Beside Her, features Justine Byrne, the series character I introduced in The Physicists’ Daughter, because she is…the physicists’ daughter. Notice that it’s not The Physicist’s Daughter. That would mean that she was the daughter of a physicist and, considering that both books are set in 1944 during World War II, it would probably mean that her father was a physicist.

And he was. Justine’s father Gerard Byrne was very much a physicist, with a PhD and a professorship and a modern-for-1944 laboratory. He studied under J.J. Thomson, the man who discovered the electron. Gerard’s qualifications were impeccable. But so were the qualifications of Justine’s mother Isabel Byrne, who was one of the rare women who held a PhD in physics in the early twentieth century. (Actually, they’re pretty rare, still.) As a novelist, I loved the idea of creating a character like Justine who will always be just a little out-of-step with her time. Justine’s parents taught her calculus and modern physics, because her prestigious girls’ high school didn’t offer them. They taught her to weld and mow the grass and do so many other things that girls who were born in 1923 didn’t learn how to do. They taught her to be so much more than anybody else expected her to be.

When her parents die in an automobile accident in 1941, Justine is young and scared, but she’s prepared to take on the responsibility of looking after herself. As The Physicists’ Daughter begins, she lands a Rosie-the-Riveter-type job at a munitions plant, where nobody expects her to be able to see that her boss is lying to her about what she’s building. And the German saboteur planning to wreak destruction on her factory has absolutely no idea that one of the young women working on the assembly line has all the skills she needs to stop him.

Those skills bring her to the attention of the American intelligence community, and this is where The Traitor Beside Her comes in. I pitched Justine and her world as “Rosie-the-Riveter-meets-Bletchley-Park” and I make good on that promise in The Traitor Beside Her, because her first undercover assignment takes her into a code breaking unit. It’s an American equivalent of the British code breaking operation in Bletchley Park, and the people there—mostly women—are doing amazing work, but there’s just one little problem. There’s a traitor in the room where the most sensitive work gets done. Somebody has to find out who it is, and it has to happen soon, because the Battle of the Bulge has broken out and many thousands of lives are on the line. The fate of the war is on the line.

All Justine has to do is find the traitor and escape with her life. Fortunately, she has never forgotten the most important advice her secretive new boss gave her: Trust no one.

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Book details

The Traitor Beside Her was published on 6th June 2023 and is available as an eBook, in paperback and as an audiobook, and can be purchased from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

The audiobook is narrated by Kimberly M. Wetherell.

Buy links

Universal Link

Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon AU 

Barnes and Noble | Waterstones | Kobo | Bookshop

Audio Buy Links:

Audiobooks.com | Audible

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About the author

Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds degrees in physics and engineering, a background that, as it turns out, is ideal for writing her Justine Byrne series, which began with The Physicists’ Daughter and continues with her new book, The Traitor Beside Her. She describes Justine as “a little bit Rosie-the-Riveter and a little bit Bletchley Park codebreaker.” 

Mary Anna’s crime fiction has earned recognition that includes two Oklahoma Book Awards, the Will Rogers Medallion Awards Gold Medal, and the Benjamin Franklin Award, and she co-edited the Edgar-nominated Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie. 

You can connect with Mary Anna and follow her on Social Media:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram 

Book Bub | Amazon Author Page | Goodreads

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