Girl in the Blue Coat

Amsterdam, 1943 Hanneke spends her days procuring and delivering sought-after black-market goods to paying customers, her nights hiding the true nature of her work from her concerned parents, and every waking moment mourning her boyfriend, who was killed on the front line when the Germans invaded. She likes to think of her illegal work as a small act of rebellion. But one day Hanneke gets a very unusual request. One of her regular customers asks her to find a girl. A girl who has disappeared from the secret room in her house. A Jewish girl . . .As she searches for clues Hanneke is drawn into a dangerous web of lies, secrets and mysteries. Can she find the runaway before the Nazis do?Meticulously researched, intricately plotted and beautifully written, The Girl in the Blue Coat is the extraordinarily gripping novel from Monica Hesse.'A gripping historical mystery' Publishers Weekly, starred review

Themes of guilt and betrayal, ingenuity and courage, and the divisive effect of the occupation on friendship and community weave through a gripping historical mystery, The strength of this novel is the author's ability to make the experiences of a seventy-year distant past seem immediate and vivid.

Monica Hesse is the author of YA sci-fi novels Stray and Burn (Hot Key), about a virtual-reality experiment designed to create perfect childhoods. She is also a feature writer for the Washington Post, where she has covered royal weddings, dog shows, political campaigns, Academy Awards ceremonies, White House state dinners and some events that felt like a mixture of all the above. She has talked about these stories, and other things, on NBC, CNN, FOX and other TV channels. She hosts a weekly Washington Post chat, Web Hostess, about the culture of the Internet, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and their dog.

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