As far as the book goes, it was fine. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first in the series. It’s a wartime spy story and I was happy to go along with the wild plot turns for the ride. I did get annoyed a bit by some jarring errors in word use and geography. On the whole it’s a smart idea for an American writer to make their “I”m British-actually” character grow up in America to explain away any of these out of place usages but it was the anachronisms that got to me. Maybe it’s because “lockdown” has become such a common term lately but I found it unlikely to be used in securing an English castle in the 1940s (this dictionary seems to agree with me), and “duvet” was definitely out of place, they were new fangled European “continental quilts” when I was a child in the 1970s, I’m sure they would have had blankets or an eiderdown in the book. There were more, but I’m being super pedantic. I’d quite like to know what happens next in the character’s story and might be back for more.

But I will not be listening to any more of this series on audio! The narrator was changed from the first book and when I first checked this book out last year I ended up returning it to the library as the change was too jarring. I decided to try again, and found it was just that the narrator was terrible.

She Reads
Every Sentence In
The Book As If
It’s Part of a Verse
With a Long Pause
Between Every Few
Syllables
With No Apparent
Rhyme or Reason
As to Why She Does
This

So, I sped up the audio to get her to scoot along at a more normal speed. I never turn the speed up on audiobooks! I listen to them to relax and take them slow, but this stretched my patience to breaking point.

The book was about a 3/5 and the narrator a 0/5.