In this riveting standalone from Edgar finalist MacNeal (the Maggie Hope WWII mysteries), mother and daughter Violet ("Vi") and Veronica Grace move from New York to Santa Monica in 1940 and encounter homegrown Nazis. Veronica is smarting from the fallout of a love affair that has derailed her budding journalism career, and Vi is looking for a new path after her husband's death. Veronica begins to do typing for Bund member Donald Pierce McDonnell, who introduces her to an array of people spouting antisemitic and pro-Hitler sentiments, and Vi meets their associates at a gathering of the isolationist group America First, including a prominent female aviator. As the appalled Veronica and Vi find that their respective secretarial and needlework skills provide an entrée to learning about the group's disturbing and violent plans, they join up with operatives Ari Lewis and Jonah Rose, who keep tabs on such activities since the FBI is preoccupied with hunting communists rather than Nazis. Featuring characters based on real people, MacNeal provides a sobering reminder that pernicious elements can lie very close to home. Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Sept.)

When MacNeal was researching The Hollywood Spy (2021), she became interested in the story of Grace and Sylvia Comfort, a real-life mother and daughter who were recruited to infiltrate the German American Bund in Los Angeles during WWII. This fictionalized version of that story sticks closely to the facts, with MacNeal limiting embellishments mainly to the backstories of Grace and Sylvia, who appear here as Violet and Veronica Grace, New Yorkers recently relocated to L.A., where would-be journalist Veronica takes a typing job for a couple who turn out to be Bund members. A friend of Violet's works in Naval Intelligence, and soon the women have an assignment: gather information on the Bund and its doings. Veronica's eagerness to take risks in the manner of her role model, Martha Gellhorn ("What would Martha do?"), leads to trouble. The narrative bogs down occasionally, with Veronica delivering some clichéd author's messages ("We need to transcend the hate"), but the historical material, all documented in an afterword, is thoroughly gripping: plans to sabotage aviation plants, lynch prominent Hollywood figures, and transform a Pacific Palisades ranch into "Hitler's West Coast bunker."

Author of the Barry Award-winning, New York Times best-selling "Maggie Hope" series, MacNeal offers a stand-alone about a mother and daughter who move to Los Angeles in June 1940 to start life afresh. Daughter Veronica quickly realizes that her new boss is a vitriolic antisemite helping to recruit for the Nazi Party in the United States, but the FBI dismisses her claims as baseless. Thus do Veronica and her mother, Violet, end up going underground to assist Ari Lewis, the city's anti-Nazi spymaster.