The Invisible Front: The Secret War of Elizebeth Smith Friedman (Forgotten Heroines of World War Two)

Washington D.C., 1939. To the Navy, Elizebeth Smith Friedman is a “consultant” in a glorified supply closet. To her husband William, the man who broke the Japanese “Purple” code, she is the only mind that matches his own. But while William descends into the madness of a “Purple Fever,” Elizebeth catches a scent on the wind: a rhythmic, mechanical stutter in the static of the South Atlantic.

An arrogant Nazi operative code-named Sargo is moving ships like chess pieces, using the poetry of Goethe to mask the coordinates of a massacre. As the FBI claims credit for victories they didn’t win, Elizebeth must go rogue. Operating from her kitchen table, she wages a private war against a network of rum-runners and spies, tracking a signal that leads from the Roman baths of a millionaire’s estate to a high-speed train in the Argentine jungle.