About the Book
-
Author:
- India Holton
- Genres:
- Adult
- Adult Romance
- Man-Man Romance
- Voices:
- Cis Boy
- Cis Girl
- Straight
- White (Non-Specified)
First Impressions: Third Time’s A Charm
What’s Your Type? Spies, Fake Marriages, Only One Bed, Two Straight Men In A Crowd of Pirates, Learning To Love
Meet Cute: Fake Marriage Of Convenience
The Lean: Competency Porn
We Need to Talk: Thoughtfully Fun
Was It Good For You? A Standing “O”
First Impressions: Third Time’s A Charm
I’m glad this cover falls in line with the other two and they didn’t mix it up at the end of the series. It’s pretty and girly and I love all the little touches that relate to the book.
What’s Your Type?
- Spies
- Fake Marriages
- Only One Bed
- Two Straight Men In A Crowd of Pirates
- Learning To Love
Dating Profile
Agent A—or Alice to her friends, if she had any—is one of the top agents in A.U.N.T., a secret government agency comprised of people who can fade into the background: your butler or valet, your ladies’ maid or server. Because A.U.N.T. recruits from young orphans and trains them to be loyal workers, not much ruffles Alice’s feathers, and there’s no ugly dress or would-be assassin she can’t handle.
Alice’s greatest rival in the spy agency is the elusive and extremely capable Agent B, who has apparently spent the last few years undercover in the pirate Alex O’Leary’s home as his right-hand man. That much forced proximity to the rakish rogue has made the eminently proper and stoic Daniel Bixby a little…different than he used to be, as evidenced by the earring he’s kept wearing long after his job with Alex ended.
Meet Cute: Fake Marriage Of Convenience
Alice and Daniel actually met briefly in the last book in Bath, where they were both pretending to be nothing more than a maid and a butler. Alice is excited to learn she is going to work a high-stakes undercover mission with Agent B, until she finds out it’s the only man she’s ever thought more than two seconds about. Worse yet, they’re going to need to be pretend to be married AND pirates if they’re going to infiltrate a pirate party to search for a weapon designed to assassinate Queen Victoria. It will be the ultimate test of their skills.
The Lean: Competency Porn
Both Daniel and Alice are orphans raised by an uncaring spy agency, so their emotional maturity is quite stunted and they’re both secretly longing for a human touch yet unable to voice that need. It’s quite clear with every reveal they learn about each other that they’re equally smitten, and Holton finds the right balance between “just kiss already” and shaking your head in amusement at these silly fools in love. I enjoyed seeing the two of them, both quite capable, become more protective of each other while still recognizing the other’s killer strengths.
Dirty Talk
By this point in the series, you know that Holton delights in nothing more than a witty, pithy double entendre or euphemism, and her love scenes are true to form. There were some moments of sweetness:
He smiled, making her shiver right through. “You know when you open a new book and realize it’s going to be perfect?” he whispered.
“Yes,” Alice said.
“That’s how I feel when I look at you.”
However, my favorite “dirty” moments were when Alice just did not get the euphemisms everyone around her was using:
As Daniel returned to the washroom to dress again, Alice and Veronica shared a speaking glance. “Oh my giddy aunt,” Veronica whispered.
“Your giddy A.U.N.T.?” Alice whispered back, confused.
Veronica’s eyebrows gave a suggestive dance. “I’ll bet that man has a golden gun, if you know what I mean.”
“No, it’s metal, with—”
“And balls of steel.”
Alice felt like she had fallen entirely off the roller coaster of this conversation. “Do you refer to some variation of cricket?”
Veronica fanned herself with her apron. “I wonder if he would shoot me if I asked?”
Alice stared with concern at the girl. She was rambling incoherently and expressing suicidal ideation; clearly, A.U.N.T. had overworked her!
Ms. Perky’s Prize for Purplest Prose
Forget purple prose—once again I highlighted so many snort-worthy lines and scenes that I’m surprised my e-reader didn’t just ask if I wanted ALL of it to be highlighted pink. Some choice nuggets:
“Very well, return to headquarters and bring us back the information. But be quick about it. Any moment now, the Wisteria Society might—”
“Find the weapon and use it for nefarious purposes,” Mia said, nodding somberly.
Daniel frowned . “ I was more thinking they might—”
“Discover your identity and force you to walk the plank?”
“Make us play another parlor game,” Alice said, and both she and Daniel shuddered.
She nodded to the old man, then strode across the room, her bootheels tapping smartly against its wooden floorboards. Alice loved that sound. It made her feel like a capable woman. An intelligent woman. A woman who had this morning made an omelet without it turning into scrambled eggs! Certainly not a woman who had tossed and turned all night, trying to ignore visions of a bespectacled butler straightening his cuffs after having bashed a man senseless.
The pirates were my FAVE this book:
“Let us in,” Mrs. Rotunder called out in a voice as sweet as Mrs. Kew’s tea. “We only want to chat!”
“Chat you right off the plank,” Millie added, chuckling.
“Millie!” Mrs. Rotunder tsked with exasperation. “I’m trying to fool them into a false sense of security.”
“They’re spies, not idiots,” Millie retorted. “Well, not complete idiots.”
“Fair point,” Mrs. Rotunder said, and the thumping against the door grew louder.
Now the pirates were enjoying a quiet period, much in the same way the eye of a hurricane is quiet. Settled in the Ecru Drawing Room, they engaged in ladylike occupations such as needlework—“oh, stop sniveling, Olivia, I’ll have this tattoo finished in one minute”—sipping a few extra cups of tea—“dearest, could you pass me the milk jug, and by milk jug I mean rum bottle”—and attending to their correspondence—“I say, Hadiza, how do you spell extortion?”
We Need To Talk: Thoughtfully Fun
It’s never made explicit in the text, but I got the sense that both Alice and Daniel may have been on the autism spectrum. Some of it was definitely just the way they were raised by literal killers, but there were other moments, like the memories they shared about their childhood punishments, and Alice’s reactions to what she perceived as over-stimulating experiences, her issue with light touches, and her inability to recognize idioms. It made for a bit more of a grounded story than the previous two, mainly because you just wanted to see these attention-starved people finally get the love and appreciation they deserved from someone other than their favorite books.
We’ve already seen plenty of the Wisteria Society pirates, and their wacky hijinks were on full display in this book, and I loved every glimpse of their antics even as it exhausted our main characters. Please, someone, invite me to a pirate house party! I would love to play “the floor is lava” with them while trying to steal the host’s silver candlesticks. I also liked that our previous main characters popped in here and there for little cameos, tying everything together.
Was It Good For You? A Standing “O”
The ending made me happy-sigh, and I laughed my way through the book. It’s such a fun, inventive, and smartly funny series that has surprised and delighted me for the last few years, and the author gave it a happy conclusion. I look forward to seeing what new worlds India Holton comes up with next!
FTC Full Disclosure: I received my free review copy from Berkley. I received neither money nor peanut butter cups in exchange for this review. The Secret Service of Tea and Treason is available now.
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This is my favorite book in the series, I love Daniel and Alice so much. I definitely thought Alice might be on the autism spectrum, but I wasn’t as sure about Daniel. I guess I’ll have to do a reread!
I do agree I was more aware of it based off some of Alice’s responses to things. I feel like some of the things he mentioned about his childhood made me guess he may be as well, but since it’s never explicitly said, who knows! It’s definitely a diverse spectrum. Either way, I loved how supportive of each other they were!
This looks super fun! I think I still have her last book on my Kindle that I need to read. Do you think I need to read it before this one?
I think they CAN all be read as standalones, although there are some returning characters in this book, and Daniel does pop up in the second book as a minor character, so you’ll “spoil” yourself a bit (if you can spoil whether or not a couple gets together in a HEA romance, lol)…and while I think she does a decent job of teaching you the world if you’re new to it, I think you’ll get the most enjoyment out of the pirate society if you’ve seen them be ridiculous over the previous books in the series (plus some jokes are recurring and that adds to the humor, like their continuing obsession with the Great Peril).