Jennifer Jill Araya’s narration recalls the “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as she portrays another smart and comedic woman who rebels against societal pressures of 1954 New York. Katharina’s life looks perfect: She has a Fifth Avenue address, healthy sons, and a husband who is a pediatric surgeon. She longs, though, for the variety and purpose she once had as a single woman working as a United Nations interpreter. When the FBI asks Katharina to become an informant, she accepts, but navigating Communist secrets could turn her boring life deadly. Araya smoothly transitions from accent to accent to emphasize nationalities and class; she delivers the perfectly rolled “r's'' of the French, a yodeled aristocratic “yoo-hoo,” and a doctor’s upper-crust diction. Squeaky kid voices and shocked tones from housewives complete the scene. A.L.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

★ 05/03/2021

Tanabe (A Hundred Suns) returns with a layered and engrossing Cold War historical. In 1954, Rina Edgeworth is a surgeon’s wife and full-time mother living on the Upper East Side, her free-spirited life as a French translator for the United Nations a distant memory. One day, FBI agent Lee Coldwell recruits her to serve as an informant on her former lover, Jacob Gornev, whom she knew in her university days and whom Coldwell explains is now spying for the KGB. Under the tutelage of magnetic Black agent Turner Wells, who met Jacob in a radical civil rights group Wells had infiltrated, Rina’s first nerve-wracking assignment is to contact Jacob, so she can intercept stolen documents in place of Jacob’s sometime girlfriend, Ava Newman, who has been a courier for Jacob’s ring of Soviet spies. Rina’s husband, Tom, meanwhile, thinks she’s having an affair and threatens her with psychiatric treatment. Her friends, her mission, and Wells, though, prove to be her saving grace. In addition to spotlighting 1950s attitudes toward gender and efforts to bring forth racial equality, Tanabe injects plenty of credible period details such as John Foster Dulles frostily refusing to shake hands with Chou En-Lai in Geneva, and depicts the Communist characters with humanity against the chilling backdrop of mutually assured destruction. This would be perfect for a film or TV series. (July)

Praise for A Woman of Intelligence:

"There is so much punchy dialogue and funny-sad humor in this novel...This is a mid-20th-century period piece, but oh, how familiar it all seems. Most radically of all, Tanabe writes spot-on about something many men and women are still loath to talk about: that women can love their children but still crave and need a life outside the home."
––The Washington Post

"Layered and engrossing."
––Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Tanabe crafts the historical setting convincingly [and] the novel moves at a brisk pace...perhaps the most subversive thing about the twinned stories is this: how well the masks and performances Rina puts on as wife and mother prepare her for the world of espionage."
––Kirkus

"The kind of historical fiction you can get lost in."
––PopSugar

"Taut and thoughtful, A Woman of Intelligence vividly portrays a particular moment in American history while capturing a woman's timeless struggle to create her own life."
––Shelf Awareness

"A smart thriller with heart...and some simmering sexual tension, too."
––BookRiot

"This book works on so many levels...Domestic suspense is often like a spy novel—vast undercurrents and power differentials underpinning a superficially close but in fact exploitative relationship—and nowhere is that point made more clear than in this novel." ––CrimeReads

"The glitz and glamour of 1954 Manhattan come to life in this captivating novel."
––Woman's World

"If you're into fast-paced classic spy thrillers, with plenty of twists and turns, this one's for you."
––Westport Magazine

"What a delicious skein of secrets Karin Tanabe has spooled in A Woman of Intelligence, somehow entwining the lies it takes to sustain the fiction of happy motherhood with the lies it takes to work as a covert operative for the FBI in 1954 at the height of the McCarthy hearings. Katharina Edgeworth’s awakening into the gray area of patriotic action is prescient, relevant, and above all, deeply satisfying. I loved diving into this world."
––Sarah Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest Book

"Tanabe has long delighted readers of historical fiction with her beautiful writing, compelling plots, and sumptuous historic details. In A Woman of Intelligence, she gives fans a heroine to root for in the strong, complex, and spirited Katharina Edgeworth. This is the story of a woman who dares to dream beyond the gilded cage and stifling social mores into which life has boxed her, and who proves the indelible power of women to change the world in the process."
––Allison Pataki, New York Times bestselling author of The Queen's Fortune

"Karin Tanabe delivers her most complex heroine yet in A Woman of Intelligence. Katharina Edgeworth, a former UN translator, unfulfilled in her role as wife and mother, finds herself leading a double life as an FBI informant during the McCarthy era. Filled with intrigue and wit, Tanabe takes readers on a meticulously researched journey through post WWII New York. This is a novel for fans of thrillers and historical fiction alike."
––Renee Rosen, bestselling author of Park Avenue Summer

02/01/2021

USA TODAY best-selling Ackerman's Radar Girls tells the story of young Daisy Wilder, happy with her horses in Hawaii, who joins the real-life Women's Air Raid Defense after the attack on Pearl Harbor (100,000-copy first printing). Leave it to Chiaverini (e.g., Resistance Women) to write a book about The Women's March featuring three brave women who marched for the vote (200,000-copy first printing). In Three Words for Goodbye, New York Times best-selling coauthors Gaynor and Webb (Meet Me in Monaco) send estranged sisters Clara and Madeleine Sommers across 1937 Europe to deliver letters written by their dying grandmother. After the death in 1941 of the kidnapper who raised her in the Eastern European wilderness, a young German woman teaches a group of fleeing Jews how to survive in the forest while learning about the world's horrors in Harmel's The Forest of Vanishing Stars (150,000-copy first printing). A good companion to Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships, Pat Barker's The Women of Troy, and poet Anne Carson's graphic novel, The Trojan Women: A Comic, all 2021 titles, Heywood's Daughters of Sparta addresses the relationship between sisters Helen and Klytemnestra. In Tanabe's Woman of Intelligence, a frustrated 1950s Manhattan wife who once worked as a UN translator wrenches open her cage doors by agreeing to work as an FBI informant (60,000-copy first printing).

Jennifer Jill Araya’s narration recalls the “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as she portrays another smart and comedic woman who rebels against societal pressures of 1954 New York. Katharina’s life looks perfect: She has a Fifth Avenue address, healthy sons, and a husband who is a pediatric surgeon. She longs, though, for the variety and purpose she once had as a single woman working as a United Nations interpreter. When the FBI asks Katharina to become an informant, she accepts, but navigating Communist secrets could turn her boring life deadly. Araya smoothly transitions from accent to accent to emphasize nationalities and class; she delivers the perfectly rolled “r's'' of the French, a yodeled aristocratic “yoo-hoo,” and a doctor’s upper-crust diction. Squeaky kid voices and shocked tones from housewives complete the scene. A.L.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

2021-05-19
A well-off young mother is recruited as an undercover agent by the FBI in this historical thriller.

Post–World War II New York is a great place to be young and single, if you’re Katharina West. The multilingual Columbia graduate lands a dream job as a translator at the U.N. and spends nights and weekends with her girl squad downing cocktails and entertaining suitors. For Rina, that ends when she marries Tom Edgeworth, an impossibly handsome, charming, rich pediatric surgeon. A few years later, Rina is ensconced in a swell Fifth Avenue apartment, she’s the mother of two little boys, and she’s miserable. The babies overwhelm her, and Tom has become a workaholic bully who expects her to have no life beyond her family. She’s drinking a lot. One day after she has a public meltdown, she’s approached by Lee Coldwell, an FBI agent with an interesting proposition. Jacob Gornev, an old college beau of hers, is a communist and Soviet agent. Would she like to help the FBI investigate him? To Rina, this sounds like even more fun than her U.N. job, and in the midst of the 1950s Red Scare, she feels she’d be doing her patriotic duty—so what if it involves lying to her husband? Seeing Jacob again stirs up old feelings, but she’s even more stirred by Turner Wells, an undercover FBI agent who, he tells Rina, is “only the tenth Negro they ever let play the game.” The game, though, will turn deadly, as such games do. Tanabe crafts the historical setting convincingly, and, although the dialogue can sometimes veer toward mini lectures, the novel moves at a brisk pace even as she weaves together the stories of Rina’s domestic dilemmas and her adventures as an undercover agent. Perhaps the most subversive thing about the twinned stories is this: how well the masks and performances Rina puts on as wife and mother prepare her for the world of espionage.

Being a traditional 1950s wife and mother turns out to be perfect training for spycraft.