An unquiet peace

Steinberg's sprightly second outing for engaged ex-spies Evelyn Bishop and Nick Gallagher (after Under the Paper Moon) delivers on the promise of its predecessor. It's 1948, and Evelyn has taken the reins of her family's California aeronautics business, while gumshoe Nick pounds the mean streets of L.A. Evelyn gets a break from her new role when Gen. Henry Gibson, her wartime commander, gives her a call. Six years earlier, Evelyn and Nick extracted chemist Kurt Vogel from Berlin, though Vogel's wife and daughter had to be left behind. Now, Vogel has received a postcard from Germany supposedly written by his wife, but Gibson suspects that it's a fake, sent by the Soviets to lure Vogel back to Berlin so they can harness his scientific discoveries for their own gain. Evelyn travels to Germany to investigate, using her role as company president as cover. Meanwhile, Nick gets enmeshed in a murder case that threatens to put him on the wrong side of L.A. mob boss Mickey Cohen, and may implicate key figures on the LAPD. Steinberg irons out the first novel's kinks, delivering a smoother blend of rom-com and thriller with many more narrative surprises. Fans of David Baldacci's Aloysius Archer series should check this out. Agent: Kathryn Green, Kathryn Green Literary. (Apr.)

The hot war may be over, but the Cold War has just begun for two former spies in 1948. After years of spying with the OSS in occupied Europe, Nick Gallagher is bored with his work as a private detective in Los Angeles and looks forward to marrying Evelyn Bishop, his longtime partner in espionage. Their backgrounds couldn't be more different. Nick grew up mostly on the streets, stealing to stay alive; Evelyn is the educated daughter of a wealthy airplane manufacturer. Her well-connected Aunt Taffy's come to town to supervise Nick and Evelyn's wedding, which is going to be much bigger than either of them wants. Following a man whose wife he suspects of cheating, Nick is shocked to discover that the gentleman's club where he winds up is owned by Hildy Brecker, the girl who taught him to survive on the streets. When one of the women working there is attacked, Hildy hires Nick to find who's responsible. With the Berlin airlift in full force, Evelyn, busy at Bishop Aeronautics, gets a call from her former boss General Henry Gibson asking her to come back to Europe because Kurt Vogel, a scientist they'd spirited out of Germany during the war, has just received a postcard from the wife he thought was dead. The family had been split up, and two different teams were charged with extracting them from Germany--but Vogel's Jewish wife and daughter never made it to safety. Evelyn goes to Germany in search of Vogel's family, while Nick discovers that whoever's attacking Brecker's employees has ties to the mob. Wedding plans take a back seat to the couple's tasks, which prove to be more dangerous than they thought. Nick ends up in Berlin helping Evelyn with a treacherous assignment involving Nazis and Russians. A fast-moving novel with danger lurking around every corner and a surprising denouement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.