The ways we hide A novel

Set during the 1940s with occasional flashbacks, McMorris' latest (after Sold on a Monday, 2018) introduces the reader to Fenna Vos, who works with fellow stage musician Charles in a traveling show that pays homage to Houdini with daring escapes from locked items. The power struggle between the two of them soon comes to a head. An unusual offer from an audience member entices Fenna to take a chance at something new as an unconventional wartime civil servant in London working for MI9. Her choice sets her on the path for an unusual and personally fraught future where she is forced to come to a reckoning with all the parts of her past that she has hidden from others, but most of all from herself. Readers will be drawn into Fen's frustrations, anger, terror, joy, and constant drive to innovate when new challenges are put in her way. This is no fairy tale, and the ending is satisfying rather than happy, as befits a story set during wartime. Readers interested in historical fiction, Houdini's illusions, Depression-era United States, wartime London, and the Nazi Resistance in Holland will be quickly captured by the realistic characters and situations.