You know the meme, “some men will literally (fill in the blank) instead of going to therapy”? That’s Alex. Alex would rather cut herself off from everyone and everything to become a spy and spend years in deep cover than go to therapy. And you know I love her for it. She is competent and a mess.
If you read The Blonde Identity (and you should read it if you haven’t), you know that Alex’s identical twin sister, Zoe, had no idea Alex was an operative until she had to run for her life with Sawyer when she was used as bait to draw Alex out of hiding. We get little flashes of Alex through Zoe and Sawyer, who was her partner (non romantic). We know she has a nemesis, and then she bursts into Zoe and Sawyer’s happily ever after and declares that she’s in an “enemies to lovers situation” and needs help. The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold gives us Alex’s slow burn, enemies to lovers romance with King, which starts the night before they go to The Farm to train to be Agency operatives. The time line ping pongs between the present and the past as their past missions merge with their current crisis. The past haunts both of them, but Alex’s past is being the healthy twin, and King’s past is being a third generation spy.
I also got an advance listener copy, and here is where I ran into an issue. I mostly enjoyed the audiobook. The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold is an excellent story to experience through your ears. Alex and King’s spy adventures are, as they should be, secondary to their love story and having the emotions conveyed by narrators works well. Emily Ellet is great, as she was in The Blonde Identity. Andrew Eiden didn’t work as well for me here as he did in the previous book. The problem was not the way he read King, but the way he voiced Alex. It bothered me that he voiced the bad ass woman like an airhead teenager, and the contrast between his characterization of Alex and Emily Ellet’s is jarring. It’s something a lot of men do when narrating romance and I don’t love it. Ellet and Eiden are at their best when Alex and King are figuring out how to achieve a goal, which is most of the book. Other than that, I enjoyed the audiobook a lot, and started relistening to The Blonde Identity.
It’s a fun series. Carter keeps the world of the spies divorced enough from the real world that I didn’t get bogged down in anxiety about the current geo-political landscape. Alex and King are fun characters who are so clearly in love with each other that one wonders why they didn’t get smacked by their elders more often.
I received an advance reader copy from Avon and Harper Voyager and an advance listener copy from Harper Audio. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.