Heroine has her own brand of spycraft

Mystery and suspense tales often begin with a knockout opening — a murder, a chase scene or a fateful knock at the detective’s door. Sometimes, though, a suspense tale takes longer to get going and, so, in this Age of Distraction, runs the risk of losing readers.

Rosalie Knecht runs just that risk in her unusual novel, “Who Is Vera Kelly?” Part espionage tale, part coming of age/coming out novel, Knecht’s narrative requires a lot of setup, which gives the first half of her story a cumbersome stop-and-start rhythm. Readers who have the patience to stick with it, however, will find themselves rewarded with an offroad tale of political intrigue and youthful naivete.

Vera Kelly introduces herself to us in flashbacks about growing up that are scattered within a spy story. In the first flashback — to the fall of 1957 — the teenage Vera has just come home from the hospital. Vera overdosed on pills she found in her mother’s handbag; she was in a deep funk because her best friend, Joanne, had been abruptly transferred to a Catholic girl’s high school. Joanne’s mother had become suspicious of the intensity of Vera’s friendship with her daughter.

This lesbian bildungsroman alternates with the larger tale of James Bond derring-do set in 1966 in Buenos Aires, where a grown-up Vera is spying for the CIA. A military coup in the works will put Gen. Juan Carlos Ongania in power. Vera, posing as a foreign student at the university, deploys an array of listening devices to eavesdrop on her fellow students, particularly those suspected of Communist sympathies.

Vera’s queer spin on comingof-age is interesting, but “Who Is Vera Kelly?” really transforms into taut suspense mode after the coup takes place and Vera is left to fend for herself amid the chaos of the new dictatorship, when all foreigners are suspect.

The pacing of “Who Is Vera Kelly?” is uneven, but it ends up being a pretty satisfying adventure romp. Given the current popularity of “women-in-trouble” psychological suspense tales, where much of the action takes place in the heroine’s anxious mind, it’s refreshing to read a novel where a capable young woman not only knows how to fix an electrical short in a transformer, but also how to maneuver around the homophobic biases of her own era.