In Which Lady Liberty Pays Us A Visit.

Lady Liberty is one of my favorite people. Paris chum, Grey's Anatomy grade "person," Law student genius, and all-around excellent drinking buddy.

I remember when we first met (still skeptical about whether or not we were really meant to be...) and she found out I read romance novels. I think I lost about 16 points in her estimation that day. But then I gave her one to read. And she liked it. Not enough to go out and buy Linda Howard's entire back catalog, but enough that when I recommended another one to her she was happy to read it.

Fast-forward five years (five years!! I weep for my lost youth!), and La Lalib is looking for more ways to procrastinate from her law-school duties. What's a good friend to do? Send over a stack of books, of course! And ask her to write a guest review instead of that important law-school analysis paper! (You can tell I know all about how law school works).

OK. Enough with the introducing already. Without further ado, Lady Liberty's guest-review of The Spymaster's Lady:

What’s so remarkable about Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady is, in short... everything. While my foray into the romance world is about (exactly) six novels deep, I know a good heroine/hero/bitchin’ plot/style/180 degree plot twist when I see one. And boy, was there a lot of all that. What hits you immediately about this book is how quickly you’re trapped in a world you don’t ever want to leave. With a lot of these (or... the five previous) novels, I find it takes about 20 pages to wrap your brain around a writer’s voice and get comfortable, another 20 pages to understand where you are and what you’re doing there, maybe another 20 to like the main character and maybe even another 20 before you’re madly in love with leading man. And. That’s. O. K. Some people like to ease into a book and then let it pick up speed like a bike with no brakes on a downhill.

Not Joanna Bourne. By page 20, her leading lady is, in the words of Kate Jones, a bad-ass, (a French spy bad-ass who incapacitates large men while seducing enemy spies, no less) we’ve met a worthy hero who is not by any means convenient (but already tortured by the heroine), and we’re chest-deep in plot so juicy the pages turn themselves. Sigh. Okay. Deep breath.

What turns out to be so wonderful and unique about this novel is its relative subtlety. In other novels, even ones I’ve loved, I’ve been ready to throw down the book for the sheer obviousness of it. In most cases, we know the author is going to give us what we want--that being sex and a happy ending (unrelated to the sex part)--but the torturous twists and turns sometimes seem contrived and, well... torturous. Not so here. Every turn builds easily on what came before and is at the same time, unpredictable and with purpose. Yummy.

Annique Villiers is a bad-ass, point final, you can even excuse her blunt and straightforward ramblings about how she shouldn’t love the men she loves. It doesn’t deflate the tension like you’d expect it to, quite the opposite. Cool writer trick employed is interplay between the “good guys”. Grey, our dashing hero, and his team of spies, though enemies of Annique, care about her, respect her, and protect her, and so we care. Then when intrigue between Annique and Grey begins, it’s speculated on by the other “boys” adding a gossip factor that makes the tension irresistible, and even more so because it’s not the author telling us it should be irresistible. Bourne managed to do this with all of her principle good guys, the mutual respect and admiration turns them instantly into friends that I keep looking for even after reading the final page. Ahhh. Okay.

How terribly triste that my first guest posting is such an effusion of blather, but when you start out with a gem, it can only go down from here. Wait...