The Spymaster's Lady

The recap

In the shadowy years of the Napoleonic wars, the spies of France and England play a long and deadly game, and few players are as gifted as Annique Villiers, a young French agent so accomplished that the trade knows her simply as the Fox Cub. Robert Grey, a cool and brilliant British spymaster, has been sent to capture her. Instead the two find themselves locked in the same prison, and the only way out is an uneasy alliance between people who have every professional reason to lie to each other. What follows is a game of disguises, double bluffs and narrow escapes, with each trying to outthink the other at every turn. Joanna Bourne writes in a voice all her own, clipped, wry and alive with sensory detail, and she gives her lovers minds as sharp as their instincts. The plotting is as twisty as a good thriller, yet the real pleasure lies in watching two formidable professionals discover, very much against their better judgement, that they would rather trust each other than win.