Do you like spy stories? Do you really like Joanna Bourne novels and wish she didn’t kneecap her heroines 5 minutes into the book? Do you like the study of aeronautics? Do you enjoy a reformed rake? This story might be for you.
Plot: Mari is a renaissance woman. She’s a part time spy and a part time parachutist, mostly doing both at the same time. Her latest job is to get inside the house of a celebrated British statesman and figure out if he’s a traitor. Fortunately, she decides to parachute into the otherwise inaccessible area where he lives and botches the descent, falling squarely onto his rake of a son. Fortunately, this dissolute aristocrat isn’t entirely without manners, and when Mari fakes an injury, Cosmo is happy to bring her back home to heal her knee (and seduce her). Shenanigans ensue.
This story is relatively light and fun. The drama, such as it is, is fairly boilerplate for romance novels. The plot is exactly what you’d expect from a fun spy romp, and by that I mean that I predicted plot “twists” literally as characters were introduced, 10-15 chapters before the reveal. The romance never felt any deeper than sexual attraction (which manifests in some weird ways, y’all – who thinks that secret blowies while a dude is talking to his father is hot?) that the protagonists confused for more, but they had excellent chemistry. This is the kind of book I’d take on vacation. It’s sweet, it’s light, it does not challenge the reader, and every plot point is tied up so neatly you won’t be up half the night still processing the book. And if you like Joanna Bourne Novels but are entirely over the way she creates fantastic heroines and then kneecaps them for 90% of any given book, I think Quincy is going to be a good author to follow for similar heroines that actually get to do lots heroineing.