Wolf’s Temptation is part of a spy series set in Georgian England whose hero spends his time trying to keep arms shipments from falling into the hands of those treasonous colonial Americans. Well, that’s different at least, I thought, but I finished the book thinking that this was a book full of missed opportunities.

Ethan Gray, code named The Wolf, is our spy and he has found three of the four conspirators sending illegal arms to the colonies. Every time he is about to learn the identity of the fourth man, he finds someone has been there before him – a mysterious woman who once held a gun to his head and warned him to cease his search. He is quite taken with his mystery woman and is as eager to learn her identity as he is the traitor.

The mystery woman turns out to be Maris Winter, code named The Raven (there are so many animal code names in this book, I had to check and make sure I wasn’t really reading one of Celeste Bradley’s Regency Spy novels) who, though she is desperate to keep the traitor’s identity a secret, is also an English spy working in Ethan’s own network. They are assigned to work together and sent to France posing as a married couple to investigate the auction of a captured British ship and find evidence for the English government that France has entered the war on the American side.

Ethan is horrified at the very idea of working with a female spy, who probably gets all her information while gossiping over tea, while Maris disdains Ethan’s field expertise when all know he seduces the information he gets out of poor, unsuspecting women. Each find just how wrong they are about the other, gaining an appreciation for the other’s abilities while on the case, as well as a healthy lust.

Ethan is from a family of spies and, early in his career, made a horrible mistake, one that is still responsible for the strained relations with his father, and one that resulted in the death of Maris’s father. Ethan has tried to prove himself ever since and feels his reputation hinges on solving this arms case.

Maris’s father was also a spy and she followed in his footsteps while trying to keep her family together in the straightened conditions in which they have found themselves since her father’s death. Maris is a much more interesting and complicated character than Ethan. She is very good at her job and can be quite ruthless in the pursuit of a case. She has also, on occasion, slept with men in order to gain information, and I appreciated that a big deal wasn’t made of this. She is a spy – she does what she has to and doesn’t whine about it.

However, several scenarios are set up and then ignored. Ethan’s attraction for Maris in both her guises could have been the source for some added tension but is left to flounder. Many scenes are fairly short and felt truncated, cut off just as I felt we were really getting somewhere with the relationship. And Maris’s relationship with the gunrunner was far too coyly written and dragged out.

While the writing in Wolf’s Temptation is competent and easy to read, it is also episodic and lacked spark and excitement. I turned the pages quickly enough, but I did so without any real anticipation for what I’d find on the next page. And the book ended with one of those cliffhanger set ups for the next book in the series, which I find annoying.

Wolf’s Temptation had an interesting premise and characters who were not as well served as they should have been.