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…
A Retro Review originally published on April 17, 1999 Susan Sizemore’s book, The Price of Innocence, takes place in late Victorian London. Sherrie Hamilton is an American – a widow with an eight-year-old daughter, Minnie. She has come to London with her cousins, Faith and Daisy and her aunt Dora to find husbands for the…
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…
“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 planning stages to Monroe’s…