Hats off to The New York Times, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly and USA Today-bestselling author Susan Elia MacNeal for the outstanding finale to her phenomenal Maggie Hope mystery series with The Last Hope.

When I read the last page, my head was buzzing. I was dying to talk to someone else who read the 11th and final novel in the series, due out on May 21. How I wished I could talk about everything I loved about The Last Hope without loading this review with spoilers. I even fist bumped the air when I read a reference to my favorite minor supporting character, making sure she had survived the war thus far.

This installment comes full circle for Maggie from when we first met her in Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, the premiere book of the series, as a British-born, Boston-raised young mathematician, who after returning to London to sell her grandmother’s home lands a job working as a typist in the prime minister’s office in 1940. That’s where the adventures of one of my favorite heroine’s begin – second only to Nancy Drew.

With her courage, perseverance and keen intellect, readers have enjoyed seeing Maggie keep buggering on through tragedy, solving murders, foiling assassination attempts, and in her role as a special agent with the British Special Operations Executive (SEO), protecting princesses, coming to the aid of Eleanor Roosevelt, parachuting into Nazi-occupied territory, diffusing bombs, ferreting out a Nazi cell in Hollywood, all the while peeling back layers to family secrets that never seem to end.

While this final novel and the entire Maggie Hope/Mr. Churchill’s Secretary series is a work of fiction, its characters and situations were based on or inspired by real people and events. The Last Hope finds Maggie, having climbed the ranks to Major, in 1944 Spain and Portugal on a dual mission ordered by British intelligence officer Kim Philby, (whom we know today was a spy for the Soviet Union), to assassinate the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was instrumental in the Nazi nuclear program.

Maggie was also tasked to pass a letter from Coco Chanel, who saved her life in The Paris Spy, to Winston Churchill, as part of the perfumer/designer/Nazi spy’s mission from Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg to use her connections with Churchill to broker a separate peace between England and Germany.

Thank you Susan Elia MacNeal for giving us Maggie Hope, for all of your heart and research that has gone into The Last Hope and the entire series, whose topics could sometimes be rather heavy to write about. While I’m disappointed this is the last of the series, I still hold out hope that someday we’ll see Maggie again, perhaps with John as the Sterling Spies?

I’ve learned more about life in WWII Europe and the UK from this series than I ever did in school. As I’ve written in previous reviews, I believe MacNeal’s work should be required reading, not only to give context to the world we live in today but to more importantly show how unsung bravery can make all the difference.

Be sure to read the Historical Notes chapter at the end of the book for the incredible true details the author drew from for the book. Hats off indeed.

I highly recommend The Last Hope for fans of historical mysteries, suspense, female heroines and WWII era fiction. While I received this advanced reader copy of The Last Hope from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine – Bantam, courtesy of NetGalley, I’ve also pre-ordered my hard copy so that I can add it to my Maggie Hope collection.

Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.