NONFICTION : The Girls Next Door: A 12th-Century Mystic, a Spy, an Aviatrix, a Persian Princess, a Mother and a Journalist

THE FATAL LOVER: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage by Julie Wheelwright. (Trafalgar/Collins & Brown: $29.95; 186 pp.) . Mata Hari preferred her stage name, meaning “eye of the day,” or “dawn in Malay” to her married name: Margaretha Zelle MacLeod. She was arrested on Feb. 13, 1917, and while awaiting charges of espionage at Saint-Lazare prison in Paris, writes Wheelwright, she waged a “personal campaign against its austere conditions,” demanding her toiletries, “her boxes of cream and powder,” and her Portuguese earrings. On the morning of her execution, Oct. 15, 1917, writes the prison doctor, she put on her stockings, “inadvertently revealing her legs . . . dressed in a pearl-grey frock, slung a coat over her shoulders, buttoned her boots, put on a dark tricornered hat with a veil and gloves.” “This lady knows how to die,” said the sergeant major who helped her. “After the shots were fired . . . she crumpled in a heap of petticoats.” Immediately, the stories began about her life and death, incredible as it may seem that anyone felt the need to embellish this already extraordinary life. “A man on horseback,” insisted disbelievers, “had ridden to the firing line, snatched Mata Hari and had disappeared into the woods with her.” Hard to go wrong, really. If your imagination is about to go into hibernation for the winter, rouse it with this charming book about the courtesan-spy.