The Alibi Club: A Novel

by Francine Mathews

It’s the city’s most infamous after-hours haunt—a glittering hotbed of deals and debaucheries. The sordid death of Philip Stilwell sends shock waves through the Alibi Club...for there’s much more to Stilwell’s untimely end than a sex game gone wrong. His murder and the desperate attempt to keep a deadly weapon out of German hands will bring together the strands of a twisted plot of betrayal, passion, and espionage—one connected to the Alibi Club...and to the most explosive secret of the war.

As the Nazis march on Paris and the crisis escalates, four remarkable characters are swept into the maelstrom. Their courage will change the course of history.

Epic and yet intimate, a seamless blend of fact and fiction based on a little-known episode of the war, The Alibi Club is a thriller of fierce and complex suspense by a writer whose own life in the spy world makes espionage come uniquely alive.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Espionage, Historical Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, World War II

400 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Francine Mathews was born in Binghamton, NY in 1963, the last of six girls. Her father was a retired general in the Air Force, her mother a beautiful woman who loved to dance. The family spent their summers on Cape Cod, where two of the Barron girls now live with their families; Francine's passion for Nantucket and the New England shoreline dates from her earliest memories. She grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, a two hundred year-old Catholic school for girls that shares a wall with Georgetown University. Her father died of a heart attack during her freshman year.

In 1981, she started college at Princeton – one of the most formative experiences of her life. There she fenced for the club varsity team and learned to write news stories for The Daily Princetonian – a hobby that led to two part-time jobs as a journalist for The Miami Herald and The San Jose Mercury News. Francine majored in European History, studying Napoleonic France, and won an Arthur W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities in her senior year. But the course she remembers most vividly from her time at Princeton is "The Literature of Fact," taught by John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker. John influenced Francine's writing more than even she knows and certainly more than she is able to say.

Francine spent three years at Stanford pursuing a doctorate in history; she failed to write her dissertation (on the Brazilian Bar Association under authoritarianism; can you blame her?) and left with a Masters. She applied to the CIA, spent a year temping in Northern Virginia while the FBI asked inconvenient questions of everyone she had ever known, passed a polygraph test on her twenty-sixth birthday, and was immediately thrown into the Career Trainee program: Boot Camp for the Agency's Best and Brightest. Four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA were profoundly fulfilling, the highlights being Francine's work on the Counter terrorism Center's investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and sleeping on a horsehair mattress in a Spectre-era casino in the middle of Bratislava.

Another peak moment was her chance to debrief ex-President George Bush in Houston in 1993. But what she remembers most about the place are the extraordinary intelligence and dedication of most of the staff – many of them women – many of whom cannot be named.

She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. Fifteen books have followed, along with sundry children, dogs, and houses. When she's not writing, she likes to ski, garden, needlepoint, and buy art.

Reviews

[Debra B · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoy this author's Nantucket series about Merry Folger, a female law enforcement officer, but this book just didn't resonate with me.

[Terri · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you're looking for a good WWII spy story set during the early days of the German invasion of France, pick something else. This book was largely uninteresting. The ending is horrible. The characters are entirely undeveloped. The Maguffin(s) become more important than the characters that they bring together and pull apart. Seriously. Don't bother.

[ameliesbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

W ogóle czemu to ma 400 stron XDD moja ma 300 ale okej....
Czemu końcówka książki nie była taka jak cała książka :((

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

The large cast leads to disjointed plotting, and the ending fails to satisfy as little is resolved. Weaker than expected in both ideas and execution.

[Mr. Ken White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating yarn

Wonderful characters but a challenge to keep straight - maybe because of all the nicknames and nationalities. Thoroughly engrossing. The three heroines are surely memorable as are the agonies of the heroes who love them.

Ms. Mathews’ writing is top notch for the genre. However, I found several segues to be more like hairpin turns or sudden time travel than natural storytelling. Apart from that, many passages were eminently highlight-worthy.

Alibi’s Epilogue makes a great finishing touch and the Afterword adds some veritable gravitas. The very last line is a hoot.

[Terry Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book, but imho, waaay too many characters. Very hard to keep up with all of them. I love Clancy and Follett, both of whom have a large number of characters in their novels, but both tend to wend them together as the novel progresses and eventually you have a cohesive story. This novel didn't do that. Characters finally moved together right at the end. The story about WWII and the development of nuclear fusion was interesting, but just not told terribly well.

[Robert Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

++A suspenseful story of the German invasion of France in WWII. Based on fact with many fictitious characters the base of the story is the struggle to create the Atomic Bomb and the endorsement of BIG BUSINESS in the disposal of German undesirables (Jews, the infirm, etc) as a reason for murder. Also the conflicts between Fascism and Communism. Favorite characters: Jack Joliot-Curie, Memphis, Sally, Hearst, Mad Jack.++

[Cristian Ortus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una historia interesante, con potencial, pero que sus personajes nunca llegan a conectar entre ellos y menos con el lector, un final simple y un desaprovecho de situaciones tensas. Con mas conocimiento sobre ciertos hechos podría uno disfrutar de la novela.

[Tammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wished I had read the reviews before I started this book. Didn’t finish it, the characters blurred together at one point and the scenes could have been written better. The pace was fast and furious up front. Don’t bother.

[Brad Kirbyson · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read this book, but usually when I read the description and some of the comments, it starts to come back to me. With this one...nothing

[Angela Correll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it.

[Evelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe even a 3.5; Fun, fast read, but not as the blurbs would have you believe, another Alan Furst. He's still king of the dark, moody, WWII in Paris spy genre...

[Tomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good historical fiction - WWII, heavy water, and the Nazi invasion of Paris.

[Patrick Schultheis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, though not as good as some of her other books. Seemed like she jammed too many characters and activities into too short a book

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing mix of fiction & truth.

[Barb]

No stars, I quit listening - just not up to listening to a WW2 story.

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve started this book two or three times and I just can’t get into it. Pretty flat writing.

[Raxia L. Lavoisier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Buena pluma pero mucho caos en la estructuración y los personajes. No me ha intrigado nada, lo he sentido muy plano.

[Azul · Rating 1 out of 5]

did sb actually understand sth?

[Carla · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, waaaaay too many characters introduced so quickly that after flipping back to previous chapters, I finally made a chart to keep track of them. But even with a chart I got lost in the plot. Who had the uranium? who had the heavy water? and what is heavy water anyway? I finished the book, but with no real sense of understanding. Annoying.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Imagine the impeccable period details of Alan Furst's novels about Paris during WWII mixed with a cast straight out of Casablanca and you begin to get some idea of the pleasures on tap in Mathews's new thriller (after 2005's Blown). Set in Paris in the spring of 1940, the book offers great female characters: Sally King, a top American model who works for Coco Chanel and whose lawyer lover is murdered in the first few pages; an African-American singer, Memphis Jones, much loved by a mysterious German; and Irene Curie, daughter of the famous scientists, who holds a dangerous secret that could change history. On the male side, there's Joe Hearst, a diplomat with brains and a heart who works as special investigator for the American ambassador, "Champagne Bill" Bullitt (a real figure). Other important actual people like John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, are on hand, and much of the action centers on the Alibi Club, a small but very hot nightclub where Memphis sings nightly and the other characters hatch plots and try to solve murders before the Nazis officially take over.

[AuthorsOnTourLive! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francine Mathews worked as a foreign-policy analyst for the CIA. She is the author of The Cutout, The Secret Agent and Blown, and under the pseudonym Stephanie Barron, she is the author of eight bestselling Jane Austen mysteries. Epic and yet intimate, The Alibi Club is a seamless blend of fact and fiction based on a little-known episode of WWII. Mathews' own life in the spy world makes espionage in her books come uniquely alive.

We met Francine Mathews when she visited the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. You can listen to her talk about The Alibi Club here:
http://www.authorsontourlive.com/?p=76

[Mary Warnement · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost gave up on this book in the first chapters, but like the fake war it's set during, the pace quickened and captured my interest as the war started. The chaos at that time lends itself to fiction, as long as the author can take advantage of building suspense without being dull. I hadn't realized at first that Francine Mathews was Stephanie Barron, author of Jane Austen mysteries, whose language I'd admired. Well done. I almost wish she were still analyzing at the CIA; I'd feel better about the world.

[Selma de Oliveira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is interesting to me. I read as book on tape and I was fascinated by the French and French/German accents. The author's description of the state France was left by the German's is detailed and informative. The fashion designer Chanel and jazz singer Josephine Baker real connection with the WWII was worth the reading.

[Mer · Rating 2 out of 5]

The interest here was what it might have been like the 'eve' of the Nazi army's invasion of Paris. What are people worrying about, what are they doing or not doing, who is cutting and running? The list of characters are pretty seedy and not altruistic and of course not alot of action but there is alot of interaction between characters and lots of mystery.

[Teri · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know a book's not for me when the f-bomb is dropped within the first ten pages. After that blast--and a few more, including a kinky supposed suicide--I stopped reading.

I guess I prefer Francine Mathews as Stephanie Barron where the "modern" language is left out.

[False · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like her writing, but I preferred "Blown" over this one. My biggest complaint would be that I felt I had to juggle to many characters in my head which didn't allow any of them to be fully developed and became a pain, for me, to keep them all straight.

[Martha Nance · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a fascinating story. Unfortunately, it's told very poorly. There are so many characters that I really could not keep them straight. None of them were every well developed. This is one book that probably would have benefited from and extra 100-200 pages.

[Rochelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

okay, but it was hard to get into or care about the characters. It felt very disjointed.

[Jennifer Eckel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Years ago I worked at the office of the NY law firm mentioned in this story. It brought back memories. A good yarn above a beach read, but lots of characters to figure out.

[Robert Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, if you like stories that take place during WWII.