Susan Elia MacNeal Books in Order

If you want Maggie Hope from the very beginning: Mr. Churchill's Secretary → Princess Elizabeth's Spy → His Majesty's Hope
If you enjoy royal and political intrigue: Princess Elizabeth's Spy → His Majesty's Hope → The Prime Minister's Secret Agent → Mrs. Roosevelt’s Confidante
If you prefer high-stakes espionage: His Majesty's Hope → The Paris Spy → The Prisoner in the Castle → The Last Hope
If you want a standalone World War II thriller set in America: Mother Daughter Traitor Spy
If you are curious about her early nonfiction: Wedding Zen → Infused

Susan Elia MacNeal writes World War II mysteries that mix codebreaking, espionage, and everyday life under the Blitz. She is best known for the Maggie Hope novels, along with a standalone spy story and two nonfiction books drawn from her earlier work in magazines and lifestyle writing.

She grew up in the Buffalo area of New York and attended Nardin Academy, an all girls Catholic school. A devoted reader, she latched onto Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in grade school, especially Jo March, whose stubborn honesty and love of writing helped shape MacNeal's sense of what a heroine could be.

MacNeal went on to Wellesley College, where she studied English literature, cross registered for classes at MIT, and graduated cum laude with departmental honors. After college she completed the Radcliffe Publishing Course, an intensive summer program that gave her a close look at how books and magazines are made.

Her first jobs were behind the scenes.

She worked as an assistant to novelist John Irving, then moved into editorial roles at major New York publishers and later at a dance magazine, where she became an associate editor and staff writer. Those years taught her how stories are built, revised, and shepherded into print. At the same time she kept writing fiction and essays on the side, taking workshops at places like the 92nd Street Y and Harvard Extension School.

When the magazine where she worked relocated to the West Coast, she chose to stay in New York, shift into freelance editing, and give herself more room to pursue her own projects. Her first published books were nonfiction. Wedding Zen: Simple, Calming Wisdom for the Bride draws on Zen ideas to help stressed out couples keep their focus on the marriage rather than the trimmings, and Infused: 100+ Recipes for Infused Liqueurs and Cocktails turns her curiosity toward the kitchen, playing with flavor, ritual, and celebration.

In 2012 she returned to the wartime stories she had loved as a reader with Mr. Churchill's Secretary, the first Maggie Hope novel. The book introduces a British born, American raised mathematician who takes a typing job at 10 Downing Street and discovers she has a gift for codebreaking and intelligence work. The series grew to follow Maggie through the war, from Princess Elizabeth's Spy and His Majesty's Hope to later adventures such as The Queen's Accomplice, The Paris Spy, The Prisoner in the Castle, and the concluding volume The Last Hope.

Along the way the books picked up a Barry Award and multiple nominations for major mystery prizes, and Maggie's world widened from classic whodunit puzzles to morally tangled spy missions that brush against real historical events and figures.

MacNeal also stepped away from Britain with Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, a novel about a young woman and her mother who go undercover inside a Nazi network in 1940s Los Angeles. Across all her books she returns to some of the same questions, how ordinary people respond to creeping authoritarianism, how women use whatever jobs they are given to carve out influence, and how loyalty can pull in more than one direction at once. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, television performer and puppeteer Noel MacNeal, and their son, and she continues to draw on deep research and lifelong reading to imagine lives lived in the shadow of war.