A career is blooming…
A glittering French aristocrat is on the run, disguised as a British governess. England’s top spy has a score to settle with her family. But as they’re drawn inexorably into the intrigue and madness of Revolutionary Paris, they gamble on a love to which neither of them will admit.
The Forbidden Rose, by Joanna Bourne
While I enjoyed The Spymaster’s Lady, it was the secondary characters who really made the book sing for me. Doyle was one of those secondary characters and here we get a chance to get to know him better. The catch? The story actually takes place years before The Spymaster’s Lady, when the beheadings are still going strong in Paris.
This means that the cast of secondary characters is different (although some faces are still present, if younger), which had the potential to be a problem since it was the comradeship between the secondary characters that worked so well for me in the first book. Making up for that, though, is the fact that Marguerite de Fleurignac is an amazing heroine. I love how she’s both pragmatic and fanciful and doesn’t let being terrified stop her from doing what needs to be done. In particular, the scene where we meet her worked incredibly well for me.
(As an aside, I have no idea where the “British governess” bit in the blurb comes from because I certainly didn’t get any of that from the book? Don’t let the blurb scare you. This book is good.)
The action is fast-paced and while there’s a few plot threads that feel a little weak, it overall comes together in an excellent story. The book is set entirely in France and the descriptions are once again vivid. This Paris is a very different Paris from the one we find in, say, Loretta Chase’s Silk Is For Seduction — gritty, rough, and sometimes violent — and it does an excellent job of conveying some of the emotions that drove the Revolution and the years that followed it. It makes me curious to go explore the city and find some of the places she writes about.
I did like the little flashes we got of some characters who were mentioned only in passing in the first book, including one in particular. (Yes, I’m being vague again because spoilers.) You could certainly read this book first and then the first one without missing too much, but some of those flashes lose a lot of their meaning because they required the context of the first book to really make sense.
I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, that’s for sure. (And I’m also looking forward to Hawker’s book, when I finally get there. He’s certainly a character.)