Meet the Author:
Pamela Mingle is a former teacher and librarian who was fortunate enough to choose writing as a third career. Or maybe it chose her. 🙂 She loves to create romantic tales that play out against historical events and always includes some humor in her books.
Pam and her husband enjoy walking in the UK–even though she’s done her share of whining on those fifteen-mile days. The walking trips have been an ideal way to discover new settings for her books.
Pam loves to hear from readers. Go to her website, http://www.pammingle.com/ to sign up for her newsletter. Subscribers learn first about giveaways and exclusive-to-subscriber content. You can also contact her via her website.
About the Book:
Madeleine Vernon’s dreams should be filled with elegant gowns and marriageable men. Instead, she dreams of avenging her brother’s death. But when she’s captured by the queen’s men, she’s forced to become a spy by her mysterious yet undeniably attractive captor.
After years of working for his father in Queen Elizabeth’s service, Nicholas Ryder is close to going his own way. But now he’s got a feisty beauty he must protect or risk her execution as a traitor to the crown. She’s a distraction he can’t afford, but he also can’t stop thinking about her.
It is Nicholas’s job to foil plots against Elizabeth, and he sends Maddy into a household of suspected traitors to garner what information she can. As the line between captor and prisoner blurs, deceit, betrayal, and desire become a perilous mix. Ultimately, Nicholas must decide whether duty to the queen is more important than winning Maddy’s heart.
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Giveaway:
- $15 Amazon Gift Card!
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Tracy’s Review:
Tracy’s rating: 3 of 5 stars
Madeleine “Maddy” Vernon is taken prisoner during a failed rebellion attempt. Maddy joined the rebellion to avenge her brother Robert’s death, he had been part of the previous uprising and was hanged as a traitor. While imprisoned, Maddy is brought before Nicholas Ryder.
Nicholas needs a spy, he offers Maddy a full pardon in exchange for her cooperation. She will be placed in service to Lady Jane Darce, a suspected sympathizer to Queen Mary of Scotland. Nicholas wants Maddy to find out if Lady Darce or her step-son have any plans on aiding Queen Mary.
Maddy has no desire to be a spy, but she has even less desire to hang. She agrees to work with Nicholas, but reminds herself that despite her attraction to him, Nicholas is not her friend.
The intrigue starts almost as soon as she arrives, a man from her past is there using a false name, but she doesn’t have a chance to tell Nicholas. Later she decides to keep that information to herself. She settles into a routine with Lady Darce and is able to glean a little information.
When she sees Nicholas again, she meets his ward/nephew Daniel. She is taken with the boy and admires Nicholas for his care of his nephew, who stopped speaking after his father’s death. She wonders if she misjudged Nicholas. She passes on some of what she has learned, but doesn’t tell him everything. Nicholas is fighting his attraction to her and when he learns that her brother is not dead and the Queen has pardoned her, he keeps that to himself – afraid she will leave if she learns the truth.
With danger, secrets, murder and intrigue dogging their every step, is it possible for them to find love?
I thought this book was well written, but I found it to be mediocre and I didn’t care for Maddy. I never understood her motivation for keeping information from Nicholas and thought the story lagged a bit in the middle. The love scenes where warm, but I honestly never “felt” the love between them, it was almost as if the author was writing a spy novel and halfway through remembered that it was supposed to be a romance and threw in the required elements. I had a hard time deciding how to rate this book and settled for 3 stars because as an intrigue novel, I would rate this 4 stars, but I would be hard pressed to give it more than 2 stars as a romance.
*I am voluntarily leaving a review for an eARC that was provided to me by NetGalley and the publisher*
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Flippin' Pages Book Reviews 
too bad the romance was lacking
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Well Barbara read this book and gave it 5 stars – I read it immediately following The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo – so maybe my expectations were too high 🙂
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