Wednesday

Rogue Spy by Joanna Bourne

December 3, 2014
Enter at your own risk!

http://www.joannabourne.com/

Well, looks like I'm going to be glomming Joanne Bourne's Spymaster series. I'm not a big fan of spy romance books; I consider most of them to be filled with some of the most incompetent, stupid, undercover spy-secret-agents ever to fight against Napoleon. Based on most of these books, I often wonder just how Napoleon lost. However, it appears that Ms. Bourne's Spymaster series is a cut above other plodding, absurd spy tales. In fact, Rogue Spy was so exciting that by the end of the story I knew I had to go back and read the rest of the books in the series.

Rogue Spy is more than just a historical romance story. It is a story with a capital S. It is a thrilling narrative of two people falling in love, and along the way they weave their way through some pretty exciting intrigue.

Paxton is a spy who, when the narrative begins, is on his way to headquarters with his written confession of betrayal in hand. Evidently in a previous story it was discovered that he had been deceiving the English spy agency he worked for. It seems that he was a Cache', which is a group of orphaned French children who are trained by the Police Secrete of France and then implanted into strategic British families and used as spies. Another Cache' whose cover is about to be revealed is Camille Leyland, an English code breaker. Of course she is not English, she is also an abandoned child of the French Revolution and when she was young she was trained along with Pax, so Paxton and Camille have a history. Now they are thrown together to untangle the lies of a really bad guy. Let me say this about the bad guy - he's really bad. I was thrilled with his plotline because I had no idea where the "thriller" plot was headed. Ms. Bourne lead me down some pretty well-written alleys before the thrilling-nail-biting conclusion was revealed.

I loved Rogue Spy. I loved Pax and Camille, loved the secondary characters - they were all great! But what I loved the most was the great all-encompassing storytelling. I was sucked into a world of dark secrets, incredible intrigue, and thrilling action which I didn't want to end. I highly recommend this book.

Time/Place: France/England 1802
Sensuality: Warm/Hot

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