spy
Want a fun, adventuresome romp through post-Napoleon English spy tropes? Lord and Lady Spy has a lot of fun tweaking the genre’s conventions while creating two characters who remain true to themselves no matter what while giving us a lot of good character work. It’s not quite perfect, but is ...
“I go to work thinking of death” begins Ji-min Lee’s The Starlet and the Spy a sentence that sets the pace for a very readable historical novel that takes a wholly different but understandably downbeat look at Marilyn Monroe’s iconic 1954 visit to troops serving in the Korean War. From its ...
Note: This review contains slight spoilers for earlier books in the series.
If you've not been reading Tracy Grant, you really have been missing out. Her Rannoch/Fraser series of romantic suspense features a compelling relationship, fascinating characters and worldbuilding that I just love. If yo ...
An AAR Top 100 Romance
originally published on August 27, 2014
In All About Romance’s review of The Black Hawk in November 2011, Jean Wan wrote, “Once in a while, during every reader's literary life, you encounter a book that reminds you why you are a reader. It renews your faith, if faith wa ...
An AAR Top 100 Romance
originally published on June 10, 2010
Plodding through forgettable spy novels (and historicals in general) sometimes makes me forget what a truly great book looks like – and then I read one like The Forbidden Rose. Joanna Bourne’s latest novel has everything I love about ...
Beauty Like the Night, the eagerly awaited sixth book in Joanna Bourne’s widely acclaimed Spymaster series, tells the story of Séverine de Cabrillac, whom we first met as a very young child caught up in the revolutionary terror of late eighteenth century Paris in The Forbidden Rose. Ten years a ...
Poison Evidence is the latest (seventh) book in Rachel Grant’s Evidence series of Romantic Suspense novels, and in it, she looks at the fascinating world of the technology of intelligence gathering and surveillance and how it can be used and adapted by academics seeking to study and enlighten as w ...
The Queen’s Accomplice is the sixth entry in the author’s World War II era mystery series featuring Maggie Hope, a former MIT mathematics graduate student and current secret operative for the British government. Over the course of the series Maggie has moved from working in Winston Churchill’s ...
This is the tenth entry in the author’s Royal Spyness series, featuring Lady Georgiana Rannoch, thirty-fifth in line to the British throne. The series is primarily set in England between the World Wars and while often touching on darker world events, falls clearly on the side of a light mystery se ...
If Jo Beverley’s Company of Rogues series isn’t the longest running series in historical romance, then it’s certainly one of them, and it’s to Ms Beverley’s credit that she doesn’t appear to have run out of ideas yet! The central character in Too Dangerous for a Lady is – in the author ...