One Night with a Spy is part of the Royal Four series and centers on Julia Barrowby, whose husband was known as The Fox. Yes, this is one of those books where the characters belong to arcane spy groups with animal names. Unbeknownst to the other members of the Four, Julia acted as the Fox for several years as her husband’s illness depleted his abilities. After his death Julia applies to become the Fox in name and duties. To say the group is resistant would be an understatement, and they are horrified that she knows their identities and all of their secrets. The Four send Marcus Ramsay, Lord Dryden, to look for anything that would preclude Julia from becoming a member of the group.

Marcus has long been promised the next spot that opened up, and he is determined that no woman is going to take it away from him. He investigates Julia at her estate and discovers her diary, which lets him fulfill all of her secret desires. Marcus proceeds to seduce Julia in hopes of finding out anything that would enable him to discredit her.

While Marcus and Julia fence with each other, she is on the lookout for a new husband, each of her candidates are staying at a nearby inn. This is where the book really fell apart for me. There were just too many spies around, and Bradley even brought in The Liars Club, which is another of her series. There were good spies, bad spies, and a mish mash of a plot that just piled on intrigue after intrigue. This book might still have earned a passing grade had it not been for Marcus, a cad who learned all of Julia’s secrets, then betrayed her in the worse way to advance his own interests. Yes, he redeems himself at the end – this is a romance after all – but he was just never hero material to me.

Julia on the other hand is all one could ask for in a heroine: smart, brave, and valiant. She survived a tough childhood to bloom into a capable woman, and frankly she deserved a much better man than Marcus. And although I found the bias of the Royal Four members and Prime Minister Liverpool against a woman in their midst as very realistic for the time period, I thought their plan for her to enter a nunnery to protect her knowledge of them from anyone else a bit extreme.

I did find Julia’s staff of ex-circus hands lots of fun and her escape from the Royal Four with their help was hilarious. Ultimately the plot was too much of a mess and Marcus such a jerk that Julia and her friends couldn’t turn this into a pleasant read. I’d recommend giving it a wide berth, even if you have enjoyed Bradley in the past.