What is the title of your latest release?
THE SPY WORE LONG WHITE GLOVES
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Book 4 in my American Spy Sisters series – inspired by a long-forgotten family connection – is about a privileged (but reluctant) Boston debutante speaking finishing-school French and German who volunteers for the Red Cross, but is soon recruited by British intelligence to ferret out Nazi spies infiltrating the United Kingdom in advance of Hitler’s threatened invasion of England itself!
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
Books 1 through 3 of the series were set primarily in France, with a few scenes in New York or Washington D.C. For Book 4, I wanted to explore the Home Front in the United Kingdom during WW II…asking myself how would an American woman, recruited into MI5 even before the U.S. joined the Allies, survive fighting Nazis in a country not her own?
Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Actually, I can almost say I have! One of the inspirations for the book, in addition to the family connection of my father-in-law’s when he was raised in France, was a close friend I met freshman year at Harvard. She was a “reluctant debutante” from Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, whose steely determination to “do something useful and worthwhile” despite her privileged background always intrigued me, AND, she insisted I come to the one-and-only debutante ball I ever attended— even providing me a blue satin ballgown to wear to the swish event at the Myopia Hunt Club, along with a stunning pair of long white gloves! Friends to this day, I dedicated this novel to her, and she flew out from Boston to the launch party for THE SPY WORE LONG WHITE GLOVES as my honored guest.
What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Beautiful, Privileged, and BRAVE!
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I learned that there is always another story to tell about a major world event IF a writer stays curious and is open to wild, out-of-the-box ideas.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Oh, believe me, I am a major “draft writer.” As a broadcaster, I had to write crazy-quickly to make impossible deadlines every day, so I am compelled to get it down fast and furiously, regardless of how terrible it might be. I still do that, but as a novelist, I then go over and over it (probably, if I counted, twenty times a chapter). Also, I’ve been a member of “The Plotholes” critique group for some twenty years with novelists Cynthia Wright and Kimberly Cates. We trade works-in-progress chapters as we write, using Microsoft Word Track Changes, making our comments in the spirit of “take what you want and/or ignore the rest…no hard feelings, regardless” – and we tell each other the loving-but-brutal truth. These multi-published writer pals have been a huge influence on my work, offering second sets of eyes when I’m in the thick of just getting the words onto the page. Each of us works differently, and I’m sure my endless drafts seem daft to Cindy and Kim, but we all agree there is no ONE WAY to write a novel.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
TEA, and more TEA…in the morning and every single day of my life at 4 o’clock!
Describe your writing space/office!
It has changed radically over the years. When I wrote Island of the Swans, my first novel, I was still on ABC TV & Radio in Los Angeles with a studio the company built in a semi-basement of my house for the morning show I did (5 to 9am, M-F) for 18 years. When we moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area, I had a dedicated office/guest room on Nob Hill in the city. Later when we moved across the Golden Gate to Marin County into a fabulous but less-than-a-thousand-foot cottage, my “office” became a large, wooden armoire with a fold-down desk. It lives against one wall in my kitchen-dining room! Amazingly, I love being able to jump up and start dinner or dash down to do the laundry…it all works just fine. A small-but-mighty space.
Who is an author you admire?
Don’t laugh: Carolyn Keene of Nancy Drew fame. The mysteries— some 150 books then published – were an early inspiration (in addition to my father, Harlan Ware, who was a mid-century professional writer). Both contributed to my dreams of being a novelist. Yes, I know, there were several authors writing under the Keene moniker, but in third grade, I once read three Nancy Drews in one day! “Serious” authors I loved as I matured were Daphne du Maurier, Jane Austen, of course, and many of my contemporaries too numerous to list. (I loved Cynthia Wright’s novels long before I met her at a writers conference back in the day!)
Is there a book that changed your life?
I think Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand. It had a dual-story structure that I realized years later had greatly influenced my “time-slip” paranormal series – and especially Book 1: A Cottage by the Sea, set in Cornwall in the very same area as du Maurier’s The House on the Strand!
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
Oh, writers can never forget that moment, can they? The incredible, wonderful, hugely talented editor, the late Beverly Lewis, called me from New York with those magic words, “Ms. Ware…we would very much like the honor of publishing your Island of the Swans.” Then she said ever sooooo politely, “I absolutely love your novel…but I would love it even more if it were fifty-thousand words shorter. Would you be willing to cut it that much?” As a first-time novelist, I had turned in an 800-word manuscript! But as a broadcast journalist, I was accustomed to being edited by mean ol’ TV producers, so I didn’t take offense. The book was based on an historical figure, Jane Maxwell, the 4th Duchess of Gordon, and in true biographical novel fashion, I’d written the story from her early childhood to the very moment they put her in the ground! Of course, I told Beverly “Yes, yes, YES!” and edited it down in three weeks as requested, using the first computer I’d ever owned to do it. Apparently, it was a speedy feat that amazed everyone at Bantam Books where these “machines” had not yet been much adopted by editors in publishing at that point. (This shows you how long I’ve been in the novel writing biz!)
What’s your favorite genre to read?
I love to read the kind of books I write … novels set on the large stage of an historical event with a terrific love story and where the history is fact-based and relationships between characters highly compelling. My life’s work, really, has been asking the question: “What were the women doing in a particular era?”
What’s your favorite movie?
Sorry, I have two: “Gone with the Wind,” (of course), and “Dead Again,” a twisty, dual story set in two time periods in Los Angeles starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.
What is your favorite season?
Late Spring…my birthday is in late May
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Where I live, I have been so lucky to be part of a dog walking group of women for more than twenty years. We celebrate every holiday on the calendar along with each person’s birthday in the group (and sometimes the canines if they’re reaching a ‘significant’ age…)! We walk 2.7 miles up and down hills, three times a week. At 8:30am on “birthdays,” we usually decorate tables with a new “theme” at our favorite coffee house, or at the parklet next to our local independent bookstore. We have – give or take – some ten members, so we’re having birthday and holiday celebrations all the time and love it!
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I think the streaming movie “The Offer,” a limited series based on the making of The Godfather, is one of the best original programs I’ve ever seen on TV. The casting is brilliant, the writing superb, and the acting beyond anything. There has been criticism that the depiction of some of the real-life characters wasn’t always “accurate,” but as a piece of “inspired by real events” fiction, I think it’s among the best in the genre.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
I love California-interpreted French food: souffles, coq au vin, etc. using fresh, seasonal, organic, delicious ingredients! Writing and cooking were my go-tos during COVID and I find creating flavorful meals utterly relaxing and inspiring.
What do you do when you have free time?
I danced professionally in my youth and still take a morning basic ballet barre class every Friday on Zoom, taught by the fabulous Cecelia Beam of the San Francisco Ballet School. (Literally, anyone in the world can join. Search: [email protected] Currently only $12 per session). I also appear regularly in amateur theatricals in my maritime village. As I’ve said, I also love to cook, so I volunteer for our “Neighbors in Need” food program that creates some 200 servings a week delivered to the doors of frail, ill, temporarily incapacitated, or food insufficient local residents in our community.
What can readers expect from you next?
I’m noodling about a sequel to A RACE TO SPLENDOR, a novel about the women architects (yup…there were some in California at the turn of the 19th century) who helped rebuild San Francisco following the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and firestorm. This new historical novel would ask the question: what did the survivors do with their lives after they’d made it through that traumatic event?
THE SPY WORE LONG WHITE GLOVES by Ciji Ware
Book 4 of the American Spy Sisters – Inspired by the brave U.S. women secret agents working for Britain’s intelligence agencies during WW II.
Lacy Farrington Forbes never wanted the life of a debutante. But after a family tragedy pulls her back to America from a post-deb whirl in London on the brink of WWII, she trades ballrooms for battlefields—volunteering with the Red Cross to raise funds for a field hospital near the Russian-Finnish front.
Dr. Charles Pembroke III is a young Boston-based doctor who defies familial pressure by earning a degree in structural design at night and then impulsively joins Dr. Noah Fischer’s Finland Field Hospital project as a favor to his Harvard classmate.
In spite of his best intentions, “Pem” is instantly attracted to Lacy who financed the endeavor and is serving as its ‘Girl Friday.’ After surviving a close encounter with Nazi troops and a harrowing journey back to the safety of England, Lacy finds herself falling for the married doctor by the time they land at the RAF airbase in Sussex.
Torn in different directions by the disruption of war, Pem is ordered by British and American military authorities to design hospital trains carrying shattered Allied survivors from Europe’s bloodiest battlefields. Meanwhile, Lacy is recruited by MI5 as an in-country, German-speaking secret agent tasked with preventing Hitler’s infiltrating spies and Irish revolutionaries from blowing up the United Kingdom’s vulnerable infrastructure.
Dodging bombs, booby traps, and military regulations amidst the Blitz destroying England from the air, this unlikely “Deb at War” is forced to reconcile a tangled web of duty, honor, loss and enduring love while the fate of nations hangs in the balance.
Romance Historical [Oliver-Heber Books, On Sale: October 14, 2025, e-Book, / ]
Buy THE SPY WORE LONG WHITE GLOVES: Kindle | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Ciji Ware
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning former broadcast journalist Ciji Ware has published fourteen historical and contemporary novels, a novella, and two nonfiction works. Her numerous honors and awards include the Dorothy Parker Award of Excellence, a Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association, a DuPont Award for Investigative Journalism, and designation as a Fellow of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries (FSAScot) for her historical novel Island of the Swans. She was named to the Martha’s Vineyard Writer-In-Residence program and, in 2012, shortlisted for the WILLA (Cather) Literary Award for A Race to Splendor. A graduate of Harvard with a degree in history, Ware is the first woman graduate of the college to serve as president of the Harvard Alumni/ae Association, Worldwide. The author lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband “of long duration” and—when not writing—takes ballet barre through the San Francisco Ballet School’s Zoom classes, performs in amateur theatricals, and walks just under ten miles a week with the Sausalito Dog Walkers in the hills of her maritime village.
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