Chicago, 1940s. War has made suspicion fashionable-and Dashiel Mountjoy's wealthy social circle has found the perfect target.Lucinda is a typist. A foreigner. A woman whose quiet competence and carefully guarded private life make her just mysterious enough to attract the wrong kind of attention.To a group of privileged Chicago socialites, that is apparently evidence enough.Soon, casual gossip hardens into certainty: Lucinda must be a communist. Or perhaps a foreign agent. Certainly something dangerous. Their accusations would be merely ridiculous if wartime America were not a place where careless speculation could destroy a life-and where Lucinda's real secrets are considerably more consequential than anything her amateur investigators have imagined.Dashiel Mountjoy knows his friends. He knows their prejudices, their vanities, and their extraordinary capacity to mistake social position for intelligence. But as their fascination with Lucinda escalates, Dash must decide how much they actually know, how much is invention, and whether their absurd little investigation is drifting perilously close to something real.Because Lucinda is not helpless.She is observant, disciplined, capable, and accustomed to being underestimated. While others chatter, she listens. While they speculate, she calculates. And beneath the polished manners, elegant drawing rooms, and comfortable assumptions of Chicago society lies another world entirely-a world shaped by war, secrecy, divided loyalties, and information that can cost lives.What begins almost as farce becomes something darker when gossip collides with genuine clandestine operations. Suddenly the distinction between the ridiculous and the dangerous is no longer quite so clear.And Dash, increasingly able to see the people around him without the flattering filter of familiarity, may discover that the woman everyone considers suspicious is not the person he should fear.Strange Fruit is a sharply observed historical suspense story about wartime secrecy, social prejudice, loyalty, and the hazards of being underestimated. Blending psychological tension with dark humor and an unconventional heroine, it explores a world in which appearances are useful weapons, respectable people can behave absurdly, and sometimes the safest place for a secret is directly in front of someone convinced they already know the truth.From Midori Indigo, author of Body & Soul, comes another story from Lucinda's wartime world-where competence is quiet, danger rarely announces itself, and nothing is quite as simple as the people watching from the sidelines would like to believe.Perfect for readers who enjoy historical fiction with intelligent women, psychological suspense, wartime intrigue, dry humor, and characters whose greatest mistake is underestimating one another.
