Margit Liesche, Lipstick and Lies

Lipstick and Lies

Margit Liesche

Poisoned Pen, Apr 2007, $24.95

ISBN 1590583205

In 1943, Women Air Forces Service Pilot (WASP) Pucci Lewis flies planes around the country as needed by the military. Pucci also works for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as a counter-spy, insuring no axis rings operate within the United States.

She flies a B-24 to Willow Run aircraft factory near Detroit. There Pucci stumbles on the corpse of a worker when FBI Agent Dante finds her and informs her that the deceased was a Nazi spy. He further explains they are shadowing another factory employee, Otto Renner, who is suspected of giving the Germans aircraft information. Finally, he drafts Pucci to go undercover as a caught jewel thief sent to prison. Her assignment behind bars is to determine whether exposed double agent Countess Grace Buchanan-Dineen is working for or crossing the Bureau as she is supposed to obtain evidence against her cohorts. The interrelated cases seem simple enough until Pucci ends up at the Cosmos Club, where she wonders if this spy and counter-spy scenario consists of no Nazi sympathizers as the adversaries seem to belong to either the FBI or the OSS.

LIPSTICKS AND LIES is a fabulous, WWII, espionage, action adventure that gives the audience a taste of the era from a rarely-seen focus: that of a WASP. Besides a fabulous spy thriller and a vivid look at Detroit in 1943, the tale also provides a fascinating undercurrent as the two federal agencies compete rather than cooperate as it is heresy to collaborate, apparently based on the 9/11 Commission that rivalry had not changed as of September 2001 except the OSS morphed into the CIA. Margit Liesche provides a soaring historical thriller that takes off at the onset and never lands until the final, quite interesting, especially because of who's who, confrontation.

Harriet Klausner