"And there was something about the eyes - dark, determined...defiant. If his instincts were right, this was a girl who would throw herself headlong into danger. He wrote the letter."

Code Name: Lise is a non-fiction thriller that tells the daring and riveting story of Odette Sansom, a woman from France who had made a new home for herself in England and left it all behind in 1942 to aid both her new and old homes in getting rid of the Nazis. Sansom became an SOE courier, a job with a rather frightening casualty rate, joining the others in the SPINDLE network in southern France where they supported local resistance groups and sabotage efforts against the Nazis. This brings Odette, her charming superior officer Peter Churchill and their radio operator, Arnaud, into the crosshairs of the German spy hunter Hugo Bleicher. It'll take all of their wits and skill to make it out of the war alive and there's no guarantees, not in love and not in war.

I suspect that the reader's feelings on this book will be heavily determined by how much they care about the separation between historical fact and fiction. Code Name: Lise is written as a thriller, using primary sources to "re-create each scene from the eyewitness account of one of the principal players, and often from accounts of two or three. With the exception of about four lines, every quotation of dialogue in the book is verbatim from primary sources." Loftis also construed emotions "simply from knowing details of what occurred, and applying the natural reactions anyone would have." (These quotes are from Loftis himself, in the preface) As someone with an undergraduate degree in history and a love of reading historical non-fiction, this concept makes me uncomfortable at best. I have some doubts about there being any universal reaction that everyone has to a situation and I dislike ascribing emotion or verbatim conversations to historical events decades in the past.

I would probably have been less...uncomfortable with the way that Loftis writes emotional scenes if he didn't have an almost impressive flair for dramatics and a truly obnoxious habit of ending every chapter with a cliffhanger. One or two can be utilized for effect but having all twenty three chapters end with them was more than a bit overboard. Both tactics occasionally annoyed me. That is not, however, to say that there's nothing good about the story. Code Name: Lise is thrilling and even my gripes about writing style didn't keep me from enjoying the story. It was easy to admire and empathize with Lise and Peter and the other heroes in the story and I truly cared about what happened to them. And the appendix which dealt with some of the controversy surrounding the SOE after the end of the war was fascinating. I appreciated that Loftis didn't sugarcoat any faults in Lise or Peter, he showed them as people who were heroic in a very dangerous time but who were ultimately as capable of screwing up as anyone else. Overall, it was an inspiring tale that I'm glad is getting attention again.

For those who don't mind more of a blend between historical fact and thrillers and enjoy stories about spies tangling with Nazis, Code Name: Lise will probably be your next favorite read. I certainly didn't hate it, but I think I'll be sticking to my traditional historical non-fiction rather than venturing into the non-fiction thriller territory again.