Giddy Brodsky knows she is lucky to have a job as a cigarette girl at Sid's Paradise, a Manhattan jazz club, but she dreams of opening her own beauty shop and lifting her family out of poverty. Since they immigrated to America twenty years earlier, fleeing a pogrom in their Russian village, the Brodskys have live cheek to jowl with their neighbours in the Lower East Side tenements. With the growing popularity of the fascist organization, the American Bund, they continue to face prejudice.

Giddy is focused on the future until she thinks she recognizes the Cossack who raped her mother in their village in Russia. Determined to get answers, and vengeance, she enlists the help of Carter van der Zalm, Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island. Carter is a regular at the jazz club where Giddy works. When Carter discloses that the Cossack is an 'undesirable' and of interest to the Secret Service, Giddy agrees to moonlight for him as a spy.

Not everyone is who they appear to be. After a shocking betrayal, Giddy finds herself embroiled in a political conspiracy that could drag America into the war in Europe.

From the gritty tenements to the glittering jazz clubs of 1930's New York, The Jazz Club Spy is a look at pre-war America and the personal battle Giddy wages between justice and forgiveness. (From Simon & Schuster)

Roberta Rich is a former lawyer and the bestselling author of a series of historical novels set in Venice in the sixteenth century that revolve around the life of a midwife. Her books include The Midwife of Venice, The Harem Midwife and A Trial in Venice.