The Lost Girls of Paris

I picked this one up because a friend handed it over with a single sentence: "It's about the suitcase." That turned out to be the right way in. Pam Jenoff's 2019 novel begins in Manhattan in 1946, with an abandoned piece of luggage under a bench in Grand Central Terminal and photographs of twelve young women inside, and the rest of the book is the slow work of finding out who they were.

Grace Healey, the woman who opens the suitcase, is a war widow. Her husband, Tom, died in a training accident before he ever shipped out, and the station is the last place she wants to be, because it is where she once waited for a train that never came. The morning itself is already a mess. She has spent the night with Mark, an old friend of Tom's, and she is late for her job at a small law office that helps immigrants. A street accident closes her usual route and pushes her through the terminal, which is how she ends up near the bench. The suitcase is not locked. The photographs are wrapped in lace. Each woman looks ordinary and specific at once, and Grace takes the pictures on impulse, then hurries to work with a stranger's whole life in her bag.

By the end of the day she learns that the suitcase belonged to Eleanor Trigg, a British woman who was struck and killed by a car outside the station that same morning. When Grace goes back, the suitcase is gone. So the novel's present-day thread is set: a grieving American with stolen photographs, a dead Englishwoman with no family, and twelve unclaimed faces.

The secretary who built a unit

Eleanor's story starts in London in 1943, where she works as confidential secretary to the Director of the Special Operations Executive, the department Churchill created to support resistance in occupied Europe through sabotage and espionage. She is not a field agent. She is the woman with the files, the one who knows every operation and every failure, and she is a foreigner in a building full of Englishmen. Her past explains her. She was born in Pinsk, in what was then Russia, and as a girl she watched soldiers destroy her family: an officer raped her older sister, Eleanor killed him, and the family fled to England, where the sister died anyway. That death sits under everything she does in this book.

When the Director complains that the secret war is going badly, that his agents keep getting caught, Eleanor offers an answer nobody wants to hear. Send women. A young man walking through a French village stands out, because every young man is supposed to be in uniform somewhere. A woman with a shopping basket and a ration card is invisible. The Director, skeptical but out of better ideas, gives her the job: recruit, train, and run a female unit. Eleanor interviews candidates at a townhouse on Orchard Court, arranges training in Scotland, and signs off on missions that drop women into France as couriers and radio operators. Nearly forty pass through her hands. Twelve go silent, and those twelve are the lost girls of the title.

Jenoff handles the tradecraft well. The operators learn Morse code and ciphers, and they memorize security checks, small personal details embedded in transmissions so London can confirm who is on the other end. They carry the crystals for their sets in matchboxes and are taught to destroy the radio if capture is likely. It is precise, unglamorous material, and it does a lot of quiet work.

Marie, a mother first

The heart of the wartime story is Marie Roux. She is a single mother in London, half French, raised in England but fluent in her mother's language after childhood summers in Brittany. Her daughter, Tess, has been evacuated to the countryside and lives with Marie's Aunt Hazel. Marie's husband, Richard, did not die a hero; he walked out after Tess was born, and Marie lets the world believe the more respectable version, that he was killed in action, because an abandoned wife carried a different kind of shame in those years.

Eleanor recruits her anyway. Marie hesitates for the obvious reason, since leaving Tess for months or longer is close to unthinkable, but she signs up because she wants a fairer world for her daughter and because Eleanor, hard and abrupt, convinces her the work matters. The training chapters are some of the best in the book. Marie is not a natural at everything. She struggles with parts of the course, questions instructions, and befriends another trainee named Josie, who is steadier and quicker in almost every way. Before Marie leaves for France, Eleanor takes her butterfly locket for safekeeping and gives her a necklace with a cyanide pill inside it. That swap matters twice: once as tradecraft, once as care.

The village with the enemy downstairs

Marie is deployed north of Paris to the Vesper network, run by a man whose code name is Vesper and whose name is Julian. Her cover is a quiet young woman, and her apartment sits in the same building where German officers are billeted. She broadcasts from upstairs while the enemy eats below. Her job title says radio operator, but the reality includes supply drops, packages of explosives, and the company of a handful of exhausted people holding a network together.

She and Julian fall in love, which the book treats as both inevitable and a problem. He is distant, competent, worn thin, and their romance builds in glances and silences until it is suddenly real. Julian's cousin Will drifts through the story too, a restless presence with a family connection that Julian tolerates more than he should.

The work turns serious when Marie fetches a package of TNT from Montmartre, carries it back through a checkpoint with her heart in her throat, and learns that the target is a bridge the Germans use to move men toward Normandy in the weeks before D-Day. When the agent who was supposed to plant the explosives disappears, Marie volunteers. She and Will finish the job, and the bridge goes down.

In London, meanwhile, Eleanor starts to hear something wrong in the radio traffic. Messages arrive that are almost right but not quite, missing small things an operator would never miss. She suspects that the Germans have captured a set in the south of France, worked out the frequencies, and begun impersonating her operators, which is exactly what has happened. Eleanor takes her fears to the Director. He tells her the invasion is coming, that disruptions cannot be afforded, and to let it go. Every reader will want to yell at him.

Arrest, Avenue Foch, and a train

Julian is called back to London for meetings, and on his return flight the Germans are waiting. The pickup plane Marie expects never comes, and Will urges her to fly out while she still can. She refuses, for Julian and for the mission, and stays, drifting between a Paris safehouse in a brothel and her old rooms in the village.

The arrest is almost mundane. A policeman knocks on her door, and she is taken to the German security headquarters on Avenue Foch, where Hans Kriegler of the SD questions her himself. He wants a transmission sent to London. When she refuses, he shows her Julian, captured and beaten, and she agrees, which means surrendering her security check, the one piece of herself the Germans needed to sound like her on the air. It buys nothing. Kriegler shoots Julian in front of her, and Marie is sent to Fresnes prison.

She spends about a month there, through D-Day and the slow Allied approach to Paris. When the prison is evacuated, the women are packed into boxcars, and in the crush Marie finds Josie, starved and feverish and closer to death than anyone can fix. During the journey the tracks are bombed, and as prisoners scatter, Josie, who cannot run, pulls the pin on a grenade she has smuggled in and takes several guards with her so Marie can escape. A German farmer hides Marie until she can reach a British unit. She is the one agent of the twelve who comes home.

Eleanor's long postwar search

The other spine of the novel is Eleanor after the war, and this is where the book becomes a mystery in the classic sense. In 1944, when the women's unit is shut down and her agents are unaccounted for, the Director fires her and has her walked out of the building. Two years later, with the war over, he summons her again and sends her to Europe to ask about the missing women, mostly, as she comes to understand, to keep her quiet.

Her search is methodical. In Paris she meets Henri Duquet, a former resistance man who takes her to the old German headquarters on Avenue Foch, where she sees a captured British radio and finds, carved into a bed frame, a scrap of Marie's handwriting that points at London. The implication is ugly: the Germans knew frequencies and settings because someone let them know. In Germany she goes to Dachau, now in the hands of investigators preparing war crimes trials, and talks her way into an interview with Kriegler through a skeptical American major named Mick Willis. Kriegler admits he shot Julian, says Marie may have survived, and gives Eleanor a key to a bank box in Zurich, hoping she will speak for mercy at his trial.

The box contains papers, including a copy of a German message thanking London for its cooperation, dated after the Director had been warned. Eleanor takes this straight to him. His confession is the real villain speech of the book: he knew the network was compromised and kept the channel open anyway, because feeding the Germans false information before the invasion was judged worth more than the lives of the women at the radios. He used Eleanor's letterhead to authorize the transmissions, so exposing him would expose her. And he tells her Marie Roux is alive, in New York, and hands over the address, because the truth costs him nothing if everyone believes the woman in the photographs was the traitor.

Eleanor flies to New York with photographs of the twelve missing women in her suitcase. She telegrams Marie to meet her at the information desk in Grand Central at eight thirty on the morning of February 12, and then she waits. Marie is late because her daughter was sick. Eleanor leaves the suitcase under a bench and steps outside to a phone booth. From across the avenue she sees Marie walking into the station, calls her name, and starts to cross. A car hits her. She dies on the street, and that is the accident that pushes Grace through the terminal that morning.

What Grace pieces together

Grace's investigation runs beside all of this, and Jenoff keeps the parallels clean. She cannot let go of the photographs, partly out of grief and partly because the faces remind her of her own unfinished story. She tries the police, then the British consulate, and learns that Eleanor worked for the SOE and that most of the files went to Washington after the war. Mark, who works in the capital, takes her into the Pentagon records, mostly because he is kind and smitten and cannot think of a better way to spend a weekend. There she finds the lists: twelve names, and beside them the German notation NN, Nacht und Nebel, night and fog, the program for making people disappear. She also finds the German message thanking London for its cooperation, and it is the worst document she has ever read.

Here the novel does something admirably uncomfortable. Grace concludes, reasonably, that Eleanor Trigg betrayed her own agents. The file points that way: the memo on her letterhead, her role in the transmissions, her failure to save the women. Grace is wrong, and anyone who has followed Eleanor knows she is wrong, and that dramatic irony gives the middle of the book its tension.

The resolution arrives through paperwork. Grace's boss at the law office notices that Eleanor's immigration entry lists a New York address next to the name Marie Roux. Grace takes the train to Brooklyn, knocks on a door, and shows a photograph to a Frenchwoman who has been waiting two years for someone to ask. Marie tells her everything, and then brings out the suitcase, which she retrieved from the station herself after the accident. Inside are the photographs, Marie's butterfly locket, a pair of tiny baby shoes Eleanor had kept for Tess, and a duplicate of the damning memo, hidden with the shoes. Eleanor never went anywhere without the proof, or without the record that she had done right by her girls.

With Grace's help, Marie writes a statement for a British parliamentary committee. The twelve women are reclassified as killed in action, which sounds like paperwork and means honors for families and a correction to the record. Eleanor's name is cleared. Grace spends the money from Tom's estate, a ten thousand dollar check her mother hands her early in the book, on Eleanor's funeral, and gives what is left to Marie and Tess.

The ending is quiet. Mark takes a job with the war crimes tribunal in Europe and asks Grace to come with him, and she declines, not from fear but because she has finally found a life of her own in New York. The last scene has her walking toward Grand Central on purpose, through doors that used to hurt.

What holds up, and what creaks

Two things in this novel are reliably good. The first is the radio work: the ciphers, the check phrases, the crystals in matchboxes, the cruel arithmetic of a fixed transmission schedule that tells the enemy when to listen. It gives these women's war a texture that stories about nurses and factory shifts rarely have. The second is Eleanor. Her hardness, her guilt, and her stubborn clerical loyalty make her the most interesting person in the book, and her postwar hunt for answers is the strongest sustained thread.

The creaks are worth naming too. Jenoff leans on coincidence: Grace's access to secret files arrives through a well-placed boyfriend, the decoy plot depends on people behaving like characters in a spy serial, and the suitcase, the address, and the memo all click together with a neatness that strains belief. Marie's decisions in France have driven readers up a wall since publication. She ignores her training at nearly every critical moment, keeps her radio too long, gives up her security check, and stays in a village where she is hunted, which many readers find infuriating rather than tragic. The romance with Julian tilts toward melodrama, built on a few charged scenes and a great deal of declared feeling, and the Director tips into pure villain in his final confession. If you need your historical fiction airtight, this will test you.

What it does well, it does with feeling. The friendship between Marie and Josie, and the way the twelve names become people one photograph at a time, is the part that lasts. Jenoff drew on the real women of the SOE, and Eleanor is modeled in part on Vera Atkins, the officer who spent years after the war chasing the fates of missing agents, which gives the ending a weight the plot machinery has not entirely earned.

For the record, Park Row Books published The Lost Girls of Paris in 2019, and the edition I checked, ISBN 9780778330271, runs 384 pages. It hit the New York Times bestseller list. It is a good pick for book clubs, for readers of The Alice Network and Lilac Girls, and for anyone who wants the war told from the radio room. Bring tissues for the train scene; I did not have any.