Book Review: Princess Elizabeth's Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy (Maggie Hope Mysteries #2)

By Susan Elia MacNeal

Published by Bantam and Sold by Random House, 2012

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Two Stars (out of five)

So, it’s been over two months since I last posted.  They’ve been busy months, dear readers (if I have any).  For in these two months I have started a new job (yay!) and moved into a new house (yay!).  Now that things have settled down a little bit, I’m back to reading quite a bit and hopefully back to blogging regularly.  I won’t preface this with any more personal details and will instead jump right in to the book review.

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is the second in MacNeal’s Maggie Hope series.  I read the first one a little over a year ago, and at the time I didn’t think I’d read any more of them (more on why below).  But when the second book was marked down a few months ago, I thought “why not?  Maybe it’s better than the first.”  You see, I really wanted to like these books.  They have a spunky heroine who was raised in the US but lives in England, are set during World War Two, and are mysteries.  From the jacket copy, I should like them.  But I have to say, I have found both books unconvincing and, to top it off, the prose ranges between flat and stilted.  This time, I probably won’t read any more in the series, Kindle sale or not.

In Princess Elizabeth’s Spy, Maggie, after failing the physical portions of MI-5 (or possibly SOE) training is sent to Windsor Castle to keep an eye on Princess Elizabeth (yes, the present Queen).  Her cover is that she’s the Princess’s math tutor.  The reason the princess needs a protector is that there are rumors of a plot to kidnap her and therefore to destabilize the English succession, making the German path to Occupation easier.

There are a number of problems with this plot, as you can probably tell even from my brief description.  The biggest one is, of course, the Princess Margaret, who would have been the rightful heir to the throne had anything happened to Elizabeth.  To really destabilize the succession, you’d have to do away with both Princesses, something the book never addresses.  For me, there was also a major verisimilitude issue.  I just didn’t believe that this was something that could have happened without it having out some time in the past seventy years.  I realize that fiction is, well, fiction, but good writing convinces readers that events in the story could have happened.  This is very difficult with fiction that involves major historical figures from the twentieth century or later—it’s hard to find and fictionally plug a hole in the historical record without readers going “huh?”.

My other problem has to do with Maggie herself.  In both the this book and the first one, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, she turns out to be very wrong in her conclusions about who the culprit is in the murders and/or government plots she’s investigating.  Her wrongness leads to dramatic climaxes, but ultimately she solves the mysteries largely by chance (or someone else solves it and she goes along for the ride).  She’s supposed to be brilliant, but it’s hard to buy that she has extraordinary reasoning skills when her reasoning so often leads her astray.  She can also be really annoying, and readers are just supposed to buy that, for example, a low-level operative can successfully dictate to the head of MI-5 who her handler will be.  I didn’t, and at times I found her “spunk” to be, well, kind of silly, immature, and possibly dangerous.

I’ll leave it there.  I already mentioned the lack of panache in the prose, and I don’t feel a need to hammer the point home.  I’ll just say that a good mystery makes the reader believe that something real is at stake and that it’s the sleuth’s job to find it out and make things right, and this book did not do that for me, hence the two star rating.