Julie Anne Long continues to fill the guestbook of The Grand Palace on the Thames with this not-quite-secret identity historical romance. Christian Hawkes has just survived three years’ imprisonment by the French for being Britain’s espionage emperor. Now he’s on the trail of Lady Aurelie Capet, the Earl of Brundage’s French fiancée, who’s recently fled….
The final instalment of Vanessa Riley’s Rogues and Remarkable Women series, A Duke, the Spy, an Artist and a Lie suffers from and yet thrives upon the one thing that pushes the story forward: the utter inability of the hero and heroine to sit down and tell each other the truth. It’s the weakest of…
Susanna Craig’s Better off Wed is delightful if slightly imperfect. With a smart and strong heroine and a stiff-spined hero, it’s warm and strongly written, and the best book in the Love and Let Spy series thus far. Impoverished spy, codebreaker and ex-army Captain Jeremy Addison, Viscount Sterling, has been assigned to the case of…
This is the second book in Susanna Craig’s Love and Let Spy series about jaded spies finding unexpected love. The premise of the series is that the spies’ boss, General Scott, is match-making behind the scenes with his assignments. Like the first book in this series, Who’s That Earl, One Thing Leads to a Lover…
In King’s Man – the first full length book in her new Outlawed series – Sally Malcolm has pulled off a feat that, in these days of clichéd, been-there-read-that historical romance is little short of a minor miracle. This book is that rare gem in an overcrowded genre and something that every fan of historicals…
I’ve reread Sarah Sundin’s first novel (A Distant Melody) so often that there are parts of it I could quote by heart. What I love about that story, and many of her books since, is that they remind me of the 1950s era WWII movies my parent’s loved. They are sweet, innocent, romantic and revolve…
Some time ago, I decided to read some of the more popular romance authors from a decade or so ago that I was unfamiliar with. Using AAR’s awesome search features, I found Christina Dodd, and up popped thirty-seven reviews – six of which were As including an A+. That looked promising – but then I…
K.J. Charles’ new series, The Will Darling Adventures, is a set of three rip-roaring adventure yarns in the style of 1920s pulp fiction, so readers can expect thrilling adventures, clever mysteries, dastardly deeds, and evil villains pitted against tough, tenacious and upstanding (well, mostly) heroes who triumph against all the odds. Needless to say, when…
Butler Mae Valentine and former Major Hamish Kitt, the spy who loves her, return in this third instalment in Sandra Antonelli’s In Service series – which started life as a trilogy but is, according to the author’s notes, going to be expanded to incorporate a fourth book sometime in 2021. True to Your Service joins…
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 still a fun read. The…
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