THE LOST GIRLS OF PARIS by Pam Jenoff

The writing and grammar in this book in the first 25 pages was so bad that I wished for a CliffsNotes version.  “Had began”?  “Mired by politics” instead of “mired in politics”?  Then there’s this sentence from page 14:  “But today the responsibility weighed down heavy upon her.”  Really?  How about “weighed her down” or “weighed heavily upon her”?  I became even more depressed when I discovered that the publisher is Park Row Books, an imprint of Harlequin.  I soldiered on through this book anyway and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the plot.  Like The Alice Network, this is about a group of British women participating in undercover activities—this time during WWII in France.  Marie is the recruit we follow most closely.  She speaks excellent French, and this skill lands her some precarious assignments, beyond her main job as a radio transmitter.  A second plot follows Grace, who lives in NYC in 1946, two years after Marie goes undercover, and discovers a suitcase containing a dozen photos of women, one of whom is Marie.  Grace’s story is not realistic, but sometimes I don’t mind a little stretch in the believability department, and that was the case here.  She embarks on a quest to learn the identities and fates of the women in the photographs, armed only with the name of the case’s owner—Eleanor Trigg, who is the third main character in this story.   A couple of characters manage to hide on their persons a grenade and a key, respectively, despite having been imprisoned and tortured, amplifying my aforementioned complaint about believability.  However, if you can ignore the writing and suspend disbelief, you may find yourself turning pages pretty swiftly.