This thoroughly enjoyable read is set in postwar Britain, and follows young Gemma Brown as she attempts to make a life for herself in the small Cotswolds village of Great Rollright. In London, Gemma had been lonely in her boarding-house, and wanting to find a sense of community she couldn’t find in the big city, so she answers an advertisement for a shop clerk in Great Rollright simply because the job offers the perk of a bedsit. She settles into her new life pretty quickly, getting to know the villagers when they shop in the store, and developing friendships at the pub each night.
The plot thickens when Gemma, who has a love for baking, discovers baking doesn’t love her so much after one of her cakes is such a disaster that it shuts down a church committee meeting. Her friend Peggy, the vicar’s secretary, points to the baking prizes on the wall and suggests Gemma ask someone more gifted for lessons. Gemma selects the town enigma, Ursula, an intriguing woman who has been in the store only once, as, to the great interest of the entire village she chooses not to buy her groceries in Great Rollright but rather bikes to the closest larger town.
Gemma turns up at her door one morning to make the request, and is quickly enchanted by Ursula’s home, busy household, and cozy kitchen. Ursula does agree to take her under her wing and teach her to bake, and the two begin a few early mornings a week before she heads to the store for work. Before she knows it, they’ve become close friends, and her boss is actually looking forward to the shortbread she now brings him. Her other contribution to the common good in Great Rollright is adding a book “corner” to the store, stocking mainly mystery novels as well as others. When she starts a book club – its kickoff powered by her own delicious lemon cake – sales in the store take off and remain steady because people in the postwar period were looking for the kind of diverting and now classic puzzles that writers like Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers were providing to their eager readers.
Gemma is the kind of person that picks up on details, even helping her policeman boyfriend crack a few cases, and when she notices that Ursula has a huge and unexplained radio antenna at the back of her house, doubts about her begin to creep in. After the purchase of a bicycle, Gemma is able to follow Ursula, and begins to suspect she might be a spy. The 1950s was the time of the “red scare,” with communists purported to be around every corner, and what Gemma notices is enough for her to become convinced.
While her evidence is at first not definitive enough to take to the police, she eventually gives in, and as a reader, you are convinced she is correct in her suspicions. The carefully constructed front Ursula has been putting up slowly begins to unravel, with results that change many lives in Great Rollright, including Gemma’s.
While this is not technically a murder mystery, it does contain a mystery to be solved, and actually winds up as a gentle espionage novel. Set in the same (or close) time period as books by Allison Montclair and S.J. Bennett, it doesn’t quite achieve the vivid sharpness of storytelling that sets those writers above the pack, but the plot remains captivating, and the character of Gemma endearing. An enchanting fairy tale version of an espionage thriller, The Undercover Bookshop provides the reader an enjoyable resolution to wrap up this satisfying read. — Robin Agnew