Welcome to The Best of Binge Reading 2023, Part One, the first of two shows featuring the most listened to episodes on our popular fiction podcast, chosen solely on the basis of the number of times you, our audience, listened to them.

They include an intriguing range of genres, from a contemporary thriller, to a French story in equal parts about food and love, a World War II spy mystery, a NZ historical family saga pre-dating European settlement, and two romances, one a fresh and funny romcom, the other a tender second chance tale of loss, regret, and the influence family has on life changing decisions.....

And like our audience, our authors reflect our international reach, with two Australians, a Kiwi, one French American, and one each from New York and Massachusetts.

We present brief excerpts from each show, with links for where to find them if you’d like to hear more... As in previous years, we’ve selected shows that aired between Dec 1, 2022 and Dec 1, 2023.

The second part of The Best Of The Joys of Binge Reading will air on January 16.

Kelly Rimmer: Spies – Lies - Betrayal

But now, here’s the first of this week’s guest authors, Kelly Rimmer.  Her sweeping World War II suspense has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and made international best seller lists, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Her latest book, The Paris Agent, a fascinating dual timeline mystery with multiple romance lines moving from England and World War Two to the 1970s with the daughter of one of those people that was involved in the war. It’s a powerful story of two otherwise ordinary women who become spies dropped into Nazi occupied France.

I asked Kelly to tell us of the story’s genesis.

Kelly Rimmer - Best-selling World War II fiction

Kelly Rimmer: My daughter's name is Violette. It's a family name from my husband's side.

And when I was pregnant with her, and we were talking about names, you do the Googling thing, trying to think about famous people with this name.

Or what the meaning of the name is. And I stumbled upon Violette Szabo, who was an SOE agent, in the F section of the SOE.

Her story was so inspiring and had stuck with me. I loved the idea that we were naming my daughter after someone so incredible.

And I had always intended, always hoped that I would come up with the right premise to write a book that was inspired by her.

And, maybe two or three years ago, I heard a podcast about Diana Rowden, who is another SOE agent, who I had never heard of, even though I'd done a little bit of reading about the SOE.

And I've also found her to be just such an incredible woman. The idea for this book came out of their stories, their real-life stories.

It's fiction. I've taken a few liberties here and there with their stories. And they weren't actually close friends, but in my book, my characters inspired by them are friends.

But for the most part, where I could, I followed the real history.

Traitors operating within the SOE

Jenny Wheeler: Part of its foundation is the understanding that's emerged since the war that the Special Operations Executive, the branch of the British Secret Service that handled all of the dispensing of agents over France.

The ones that were so tremendously brave as to jump out of planes into enemy territory and work to support the Resistance...

Some of those people were betrayed from within the SOE even before they set foot on French soil.

Kelly Rimmer: There's plenty of scenarios where agents landed and were met by Nazi troops on the ground as they were landing.

In hindsight, it's very clear that there were people in the SOE who were betraying information through to the Nazis, but at the time they were operating blind in so many ways.

As soon as I came across that idea and this, gentleman named Henri Dericourt, who was thought to have potentially been quite senior in the SOE,