Based on a true story of a mother and daughter who go underground to help thwart a group of Californians who want to overthrow the government. They did mange to stop Nazi plots in Los Angeles during WWII.
Veronica and her mother, Vi Grace, go undercover to gather enough information about the California Reich to take to authorities. ( )

Story of a mother and daughter who worked together to spy on the Nazi movement in the US in the early 1940s. Veronica Grace wants to be a reporter, but when she has a relationship with a married man, her future in journalism in NY is doomed. She and her mother, Vivian, a widower, move to CA. While there, they are exposed to extreme hatred towards Jews and it disgusts them. They are recruited to become spies to take down the Nazis. This is based on a real-life mother/daughter team who helped to destroy Nazi plots in Los Angeles during the war. (Sylvia Comfort and her mother, Vi)
This is a well written historical novel, and really exposes how easy it is to be lured into hatred via propaganda. We need to guard against this every day. ( )

MacNeal bases this book on a pair of mother-daughter spies who worked in Los Angeles at the cusp of WWII. Veronica and Vi Grace move to Santa Monica to start over. It's 1940 and the war is becoming more of a reality as Roosevelt's reelection looms and isolationism is a way for social groups such as a German run one in LA to recruit new members. Veronica stumbles into a typing assignment and discovers it's all Nazi propoganda. She and her mother try to alert the local FBI, but instead a man named Ari Lewis contacts them and their life as "good Germans" makes it easy for them to infiltrate the local German community. This was good and unsettling at the same time. I didn't know much about the West Coast having that much antiwar activity until MacNeal's other series touched on it in a recent book. ( )

The Grace women, mother, Violet and daughter, Veronica are brave, charismatic and a little bit crazy. Spying on and fighting American homegrown Nazis in the United States in 1940 was a very dangerous occupation.

MacNeal has done her research and exposes a Los Angeles, California spy operation that infiltrated and sought to destroy the nefarious organizations with little or no help from any government agency. Much is made of J. Edgar Hoover looking under the bed for communists while ignoring, the Nazis, the Bund, and the KKK. The efforts of the men who formed and ran the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles is given careful and admiring attention. It was though their efforts, along with other Jewish organizations, that many Nazis within the United States were arrested, prosecuted and deported. They are also credited with the prevention of sabotage, murder and the assassination of American political figures and celebrities.

MacNeal excelled at taking a small idea and making it completely comprehensible - humans who went terribly wrong, humans who wanted “purpose, companionship, a sense of identity and community” but who also see themselves as superior as well as victims. It was so easy for this group to “extrapolate from one person and situation into the hate of the many.” MacNeal shows us how “it’s all too easy … to fall into hate.”

Although the characters are fictional they are inspired by real people which adds import to the entire notion of what can and did happen in our “living book of democracy”. Thank you Bantam Books and NetGalley for a copy. ( )

Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope WWII mysteries is one of the few series I will always read, and her latest book, Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, is a standalone novel. The last Maggie Hope novel, The Hollywood Spy, had Maggie in WWII Los Angeles, where Maggie tangled with Nazis. Mother Daughter Traitor Spy tells the story of Veronica and her mother Violet during WWII. When Veronica makes a bad personal choice, she loses her job in New York and she and her widowed mother move to Los Angeles. Veronica unintentionally finds herself as secretary for someone who is heavily involved in the Nazi movement in the United States. Meanwhile, Violet's lovely embroidery catches the eye of a Nazi leader's wife, and soon she is designing and sewing clothes for many of the women's friends. Horrified by the things they are hearing, Veronica and her mother go to law enforcement and end up working as spies for the US military. I found myself wanting to know more about this time period in Los Angeles after reading The Hollywood Spy, and was so happy to see that Susan Elia MacNeal was continuing this fascinating story in Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, based on two real women. As I read this terrific story, I could not help but see the connections between what was happening politically in the 1940s and what is happening in our country in the last few years, and that adds to the importance of this book. This one publishes on September 20th, and if you like historical fiction, this is one you must read. ( )