Spy in a Little Black Dress
CIA agent Jacqueline Bouvier, on assignment in Cuba in 1952, meets Fidel Castro (advising him to grow a beard to look older) and is rescued by Ernest Hemingway in this sequel to Paris to Die For (2011). Sent to search for a nineteenth-century treasure and to ascertain Castro’s political leanings, the intrepid young woman is trailed by three East German agents reminiscent of the Three Stooges, by Chicago Mob members, and by Cuban secret intelligence forces. (Her collateral assignment, temporarily put on hold, is to woo womanizing congressman Jack Kennedy to become a friend of the agency.) Once in Havana, Jackie skillfully escapes from a pit of hungry crocodiles and evades wretched Cuban prisons and death threats, often with the aid of handsome revolutionary lawyer Emiliano Martinez, an inevitable love interest. Other luminaries make cameo appearances, among them Frank Sinatra, to whom Jackie suggests the perfect role to boost his flagging movie career. There’s plenty to enjoy in this light spy caper by wife-and-husband team Maxine Schnall and Ken Salikof, as long as the reader is willing to suspend credulity. --Michele Leber