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A riveting historical thriller about a Jewish cigarette girl in New York who finds the Cossack who burned down her Russian village years earlier. Her discovery causes her to be swept up in a political conspiracy on the eve of World War II―from the bestselling author of The Midwife of Venice.
Canadian Living magazine: The Jazz Club Spy is a book club pick (PULSE-POUNDING NOVELS THAT SAY SOMEONE’S ALWAYS WATCHING…) in their Holiday 2023 issue.
Your Bookish Life: Most Anticipated Books November 2023. Link here.
The Suburban (Quebec newspaper): Book event announcement. Link here.
Metroland Media: The Jazz Club Spy was included in their roundup. This roundup + review was syndicated across 25 Metroland newspaper sites. Link here.
CBC Books: Fall 2023 roundup. Link here.
New York 1938:
Giddy Brodsky knows she is lucky to have a job as a cigarette girl at Sid’s Paradise, a Manhattan jazz club, but she dreams of opening her own beauty shop and lifting her family out of poverty. Since they immigrated to America twenty years earlier, fleeing a pogrom in their Russian village, the Brodskys have live cheek to jowl with their neighbours in the Lower East Side tenements. With the growing popularity of the fascist organization, the American Bund, they continue to face prejudice.
Giddy is focused on the future until she thinks she recognizes the Cossack who raped her mother in their village in Russia. Determined to get answers, and vengeance, she enlists the help of Carter van der Zalm, Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island. Carter is a regular at the jazz club where Giddy works. When Carter discloses that the Cossack is an ‘undesirable’ and of interest to the Secret Service, Giddy agrees to moonlight for him as a spy.
Not everyone is who they appear to be. After a shocking betrayal, Giddy finds herself embroiled in a political conspiracy that could drag America into the war in Europe.
From the gritty tenements to the glittering jazz clubs of 1930’s New York, The Jazz Club Spy is a look at pre-war America and the personal battle Giddy wages between justice and forgiveness.
