Joanna Bourne: The Spymaster's Lady

A British spymaster must enter France and bring back a brilliant, dangerous and elusive French spy who knows the details of Napoleon’s plans to invade England.
When the two of them end up in the same dungeon they form an uneasy alliance in order to escape the French secret police. Once they achieve freedom the French spy wants to go her own way but the British spymaster is determined to bring her in.
The pair is hunted through France and the French spy manages to escape both her British captor and her murderous countrymen. But her freedom is short lived. She is recaptured and finds herself in Britain where the two rivals become lovers while she plans her escape.
She soon learns that the British are not the only ones interested in what she knows and that the French have issued an order for her death.
She is torn between loyalty to France and the safe haven offered by her lover for the price of Napoleon’s plans. Making the only decision she can live with she escapes the British and presents herself to the French bargaining for her life by naming traitors to the French cause.
Her lover finds her at the French spy safe house and convinces his French counterpart to release her into his custody claiming, falsely, that she has been a British plant the entire time. Deals are done.
She is free to choose her own future. Naturally it will include her British spymaster.
This story is what happens when a great plot meets fantastic characterisation and good research. I loved it.
The heroine was intelligent, competent, talented and determined. The hero was pure alpha but believably vulnerable. There was a little bit of the victor’s version of history (the British spies didn’t use indiscriminate torture like the French spies) but not so much as to be completely unbelievable of the period.
There are a number of surprise twists that are unexpected but not unbelievable. And the ending got the heroine neatly out of a seemingly impossible moral dilemma.
This is historical romance as it should be written.-Lynn

Old Bones - Aaron Elkins

Forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver is mostly enjoying his conference in France, which is more than can be said for his friend FBI agent John Lau. He was hoping while in the country to catch up with Guillame du Rocher, whom he'd met previously and whose company he'd enjoyed. When Oliver is asked to assist with identifying some bones found in an old cellar he's initially delighted to learn that it's du Rocher's home, then saddened to learn that the old man had died only days earlier, caught in quick sand and drowning in the lightening fast tide off the coast.
The age of the bones indicates they belonged to a man who died during the Second World War, information that causes many of the involved French locals to try to shut down the investigation. As Oliver continues to pursue the partial skeleton's identity secrets from the past come to life, their effects rippling through du Rocher's tragic death and endangering Oliver's life.
This is the second Oliver novel I've read, though not the second in the series. Unlike my first encounter with the "famous American Bone Detective" I was not really aware of the time lag between publication (1987) and my reading, except in regards to the WW2 timing. Oliver is engaging and interesting, the Normandy setting was a refreshing change from the more usual locales, and I caught shades of Christie's style in both the country house/family setting and the time table detailing (which will make sense if you read the book).
There are notes of humour (I particularly liked Oliver's statement that the bones could be human or perhaps those of a polydactylous pig), and an interesting albeit brief discussion about the erosion of grammar and spelling ("Wither Man" - hilarious) was particularly illuminating given the age of the population he's discussing - the university students of the mid-eighties are not only my peers but also the people criticising this in today's students.
I love learning new things in unexpected places. One here was the existence of the apparently spectacular Mont St Michel, which I now have to add to places I want to see (and which reminds me of the Rock of Gibraltar), and a long-held question I had was answered - while bones retain information about musculature (because of the depth and strength of insertion points), they don't give any information about non-muscle weight. The subsidiary question, why reconstructions on TV shows therefore always create 'normal weight' people, was sadly unanswered but this is a start.
None of this detracted from the overall involving mystery. The characterisation was a little thin, with some reliance on stereotype - I particularly noted the gluttonous son whose furious devouring of sweet treats, pushed into his pink mouth with a finger tip, is mirrored by his avarice. The lead character, however, is well drawn, and the pace of the novel prevented the drawbacks from overshadowing the book as a whole. Though I won't be rushing out to read the next one, when another Elkins novel crosses my path I will read it. - Alex