An Unlikely Agent
-
-
4.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
A desperate woman in Edwardian London finds an unlikely new job with an undercover spy organization in this charming historical thriller.
London, 1905. Margaret Trant and her ailing mother have fallen on hard times. Living together in a dreary boarding house in St John’s Wood, Margaret’s job with a ramshackle import-export company barely keeps them afloat. Then Margaret spots a newspaper advertisement promising to ‘open new horizons beyond your wildest dreams!’.
After a grueling interview, Margaret finds herself in a new position as a secretary in a dingy backstreet shop. But all is not as it seems; she is in fact working for a highly secret branch of the intelligence service, Bureau 8, whose mission is to track down and neutralize a ruthless band of anarchists known as The Scorpions.
Margaret’s guilty love of detective fiction scarcely prepares her for the reality of true criminality. But she soon discovers that she’s far more resourceful and courageous than she ever imagined . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Margaret Trant, the heroine of Menczer's pallid debut set in 1905, has worked for years as a secretary for a small London export firm run by Horace Plimpson, a friend of her late father. She's distraught when her employer informs her that the business will be relocating because of some unspecified problems, which forces her to find some other employment. Serendipitously, a stranger hands her a newspaper he claims she dropped that happens to be open to a page containing an ad for a "unique" secretarial position that would "open new horizons." After a brief interview consisting principally of questions about her former boss, Margaret is offered the position, only to learn that she's been hired to work for a shadowy government agency known simply as Bureau 8, whose operatives are on the trail of the Society of Scorpions, a secret group bent on overthrowing the British government. The story line follows predictable paths, and the overabundance of genre tropes isn't compensated for by either memorable writing or characterization.
