A fascinating and exciting, if slightly surface-level, story of the super badass spy Virginia Hall, focusing on her time in France during the Second World War working for the British Special Operations Executive, and later the American Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner to the CIA.

Author Sonia Purnell had her work cut out for her researching Hall's life and legacy, as the author herself acknowledges Hall was extremely reluctant to ever talk about her work. Purnell relies on declassified messages sent from Hall from the field, and testimonials of people who knew her, from her contacts in the French Resistance to colleagues in the SOE and OSS. As a result there are times when Purnell makes assumptions about Hall's thoughts, emotions and opinions in order to keep the audience engaged, but it was a bit problematic.

Purnell is also a little prone to hyperbole and cliché in her writing, using expressions like "rotting in prison" to try to add drama to what was already a dramatic situation. Similarly I didn't need the detailed description of Nazi torture methods to appreciate what Virginia's contacts went through. But overall I thought the book did a good job highlighting an underappreciated woman in history and it was helpful in understanding another face of WWII.