A widow with a past… The last thing Victoria Barrett, the Viscountess Waters, has any interest in is romance. When the only man she’s ever loved was killed she endured an arranged marriage to a cruel man in order to survive. Now widowed, her only focus is on clearing her son’s name from the charge of murder. That is until the love of her life returns from the grave.
A leader of a once great agency… Nathaniel Archer, the Earl of Exeter and head of the Crown’s elite organization, The Brethren, is back on British soil. Captured and tortured 20 years ago, he clung to memories of his first love until he could escape. Discovering she has married whilst he was captive, Nathaniel sets aside the distractions of love…until an unexpected case is thrust upon him– to solve the murder of the Viscount Waters. There is just one complication: the prime suspect’s mother is none other than Victoria, the woman he once loved with his very soul.
Secrets will be uncovered and passions rekindled. Victoria and Nathaniel must trust one another if they hope to start anew—in love and life. But will duty destroy their last chance?
The Spy Who Seduced Her, by Christi Caldwell
Where to start? Well, this says it’s the first book of a series. This is true, in that it is technically the first book of what is I believe the third series set in the same world by Christi Caldwell. I’ve probably even read other books in the other two series …possibly. Things do start to blur together after a while.
Which means I’ve managed to continue my current trend of jumping into a series with characters who are already established and having no idea of what’s going on. Whoops. I didn’t mean to do that. And while you can technically make it through just fine without having the backstory (I mean, I did), I think this book probably loses something in the experience when you do it that way.
Victoria Barrett and Nathaniel Archer have been characters in other books. Victoria is the mother of three grown children and is finally free of her abusive husband – a man she married when she was left with no other choice following her lover’s disappearance. Now, however, her son is suspected of murdering his father. (Her daughters are both happily married.) She is desperate to protect him and shocked when her former lover shows up to lead the investigation.
Nathaniel Archer had lost everything and so made the Brethren his life, but when he learns that the lady he’s always loved is connected to an ongoing murder investigation, he takes matters into his own hands despite the rules he’s lived by since becoming the leader of the Brethren. It tears open wounds imperfectly healed on both sides but offers them both a second chance at something they thought lost to them: love.
I liked that both the hero and heroine in this story are older – that’s not something you see a lot in romance novels in general and certainly not in Regency-era stories in particular. But Victoria has three grown children and it’s been over twenty-two years since they last saw each other. They’ve both changed as people from the young lovers they were, and a lot of this book is about moving past the regrets and pain to find forgiveness and the chance for new growth.
That said, some of the emotional responses felt a little flat to me, and I think part of that was because I wasn’t invested in the characters as much as I could have been. It’s pretty clear from the references that many of the side characters are couples whose stories were told in other books, and so this provides an opportunity to catch up with them – but it also means that for those of us who haven’t read the stories, there’s very little there to build our understanding off of. I feel like if I had that background, the characters would have been a little more rounded and it wouldn’t have felt quite as rushed.
So if you’re already a fan of her various series, you probably don’t need my review to tell you to pick this up – but if, like me, you’re new to Christi, it might be worth starting elsewhere, where there are fewer established characters to negotiate around.