Presents an author's account of the many disguises she employs to dine undetected when she takes on the much coveted and highly prestigious job of "New York Times" restaurant critic. Through these spy games, she finds herself changed not just physically, but also in character.

Trying to escape her unhappy past, Billie Breslin leaves her home in California for New York to take a job at the premier food magazine Delicious Everyone there cooks but Billie refuses to, despite her perfect palate; she prefers to write about recipes rather than revisit a past she would rather forget. At Delicious , Billie discovers a treasure: the magazine's hidden library. There she finds the letters of Lulu Swan, a young girl who wrote to the magazine in 1941. As Billie reads Lulu's vivid evocations of wartime life, she finds that she is able to make peace with her own grief and sets on...