"The Company We Keep" by Kay Simone

The Company is a gang run by A.R. Carrow and his handpicked family of criminals.  They pull off dramatic heists around southern California for themselves and others and have stolen billions in the process.  When their demolition expert is killed, they must find a replacement who not only won't blow them to bits but will fit in with their family of outcasts and misfits.  Enter Dustin Wrenshall, an explosives professional who seems to pass all of their tests and who pushes the self control of Carrow with his fearless flirtation.  However, Dustin is really Charlie Judge, an FBI agent who's been trained to infiltrate and take down The Company.  (No, this isn't a spoiler; it's in the book's description.)

This is the best book I have read in a quite a while.  Everything the author did was spot on, and she seamlessly went back and forth between past and present, including Charlie's and Carrow's childhoods.  I was totally hooked not just by the suspense but also the characters and their relationships with each other.  The struggle that Dustin/Charlie has with working the case and his feelings for The Company nearly tear him and everyone else apart.  It was a really unusual and well written story, and I can't wait to read more by this author.  271 pages (Kindle edition).

A Lesson In Secrets: A Maisie Dobbs Novel, book 8, by Jacqueline Winspear

1932 finds Maisie Dobbs being asked to take an first assignment for the British Secret Service!  She leaves her business in her assistants' hands and goes undercover to Cambridge as a Classics professor—and leads to the investigation of a web of activities being conducted by the emerging Nazi Party.

When the college's controversial pacifist founder and principal, Greville Liddicote, is murdered, Maisie is directed to stand back as Detective Chief Superintendent Robert MacFarlane and Detective Chief Inspector Richard Stratton spearhead the investigation. She soon discovers, however, that the circumstances of Liddicote's death appear inextricably linked to the suspicious comings and goings of faculty and students under her surveillance.
To unravel this web, Maisie must overcome a reluctant Secret Service, discover shameful hidden truths about Britain's conduct during the Great War, and face off against the rising powers of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the Nazi Party—in Britain.
352 pages