Into the Fire — Alexander Fullerton

The first thriller in the WWII series featuring SOE agent Rosie Ewing, a “meticulously researched war novel” (Len Deighton).
 
Summer 1943: Rosie Ewing is an agent of SOE -- Special Operations Executive -- and a “pianist,” Resistance slang for radio operator. Their average life expectancy is six weeks.
 
But Rosie is brighter than most, well aware of the consequences of a second's carelessness, or bad luck, or treachery. Or a fellow agent crumbling under torture, naming names.

Her brief is to set up a new network in occupied Rouen, where the old one has been blown and an agent is suspected of betrayal. If she gets there, that is. Landing from a gunboat on the Brittany coast, she must travel to Paris -- carrying forged papers, a radio transceiver, and more than a million francs in cash . . .

Frighteningly realistic, unbearably exciting, the Rosie Ewing spy thrillers come from Alexander Fullerton, acclaimed for his “talent for combining historical fact with rousing fiction” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“The tension rarely slackens and the setting is completely convincing.” -- The Times Literary Supplement
 
“His action passages are superb.” -- The Observer