The Bottom Line: A sexy, dark and thoroughly addictive thriller. Wildsmith is quickly carving out a genre all her own, and we are all in.
In Evelina Fontana, M. Rebecca Wildsmith introduces a heroine whose dangerous intelligence precedes her formal career in espionage. Italian-born and raised in France, Evelina is an impatient nurse more fascinated by disturbed minds than ordinary medical care. Her interest in a patient’s claims leads her into an affair with Stefan Lavigne, the woman’s violent, controlling husband. When Evelina breaks into Stefan’s private papers, solves an elaborate cipher and discovers that he is a British agent, he responds first with brutality and then with professional admiration.Â
Rather than silence her, he recruits her. Years later, operating under the code name Étrange, Evelina is ordered behind enemy lines to infiltrate a remote psychiatric institution in Fascist Italy.
Wildsmith fans familiar with her first two novels will recognize her fascination with historical settings spanning the interwar years and World War II. Where Hattie Vavaseur explored memory and occult disruption within a socially constrained country-house world, and Verity Easton joined childhood vulnerability to murder and ancient mystery in 1930s Egypt, Evelina Fontana carries those concerns into the harsher terrain of wartime espionage.Â
Evelina Fontana is the darkest and most morally complicated of the three, expanding the author’s characteristic supernatural unease into questions of institutional power, political loyalty and the weaponization of the human mind.
Here, Wildsmith writes in an ornate, period-conscious style, combining dark humor, sensuality and Gothic unease. That approach extends to the novel’s frequent sexual content, which, refreshingly, is conveyed through old-fashioned euphemism and heightened romantic language rather than blunt modern terminology.
Her target is Doctor Oskar Voigt, a German physician suspected of involvement in an intelligence leak that could damage the Allied war effort. The journey to Marello Psychiatric Hospital immediately establishes the novel’s unforgiving stakes. Stefan is attacked, she is captured and narrowly escapes a boat deliberately sunk with her trapped aboard.
As Evelina penetrates Marello’s hidden structure, the novel widens from a wartime murder mystery into a historical espionage thriller shaped by psychological horror and supernatural suspense. The cherries surrounding the grounds, the carefully staged rooms, the unexplained wounds and the fragments of military information emerging from impossible sources all point toward a conspiracy more ambitious than conventional code theft. The later revelations substantially alter the meaning of the early clues without feeling detached from them, and the novel’s surprises are rooted in the novel’s atmosphere and recurring imagery rather than delivered as empty shocks.
The supporting cast is a deeply rich one, but perhaps no character is as galling or intriguing as Stefan. Both a mentor and an abuser, Stefan strikes his institutionalized wife, initiates his affair with Evelina by following her into a dispensary and kissing and touching her without invitation, and later hits Evelina hard enough to draw blood when he discovers that she has searched his private papers. He threatens to kill her, takes possession of her passport and repeatedly treats obedience as something he is entitled to demand. At the same time, he recognizes and cultivates Evelina’s intelligence, recruits her into espionage, and respects her abilities in ways many other men do not, which helps explain her continued attraction to him.
It also helps explain why the book is so impossible to put down. If all espionage fiction books delivered this level of characterization, there would be no reason for anyone to read any other genre. Except that this isn’t purely a spy novel, nor is merely historical fiction. Wildsmith is quickly carving out a genre all her own, and Evelina Fontana is a journey well worth taking.
