For a while, I was debating whether or not I should review this. I know my fellow Smart Bitches received many a frustrated email about this book. Normally, I enjoy Shana Galen’s historicals, but this one definitely struck a nerve in the worst way possible. Also, I want to go ahead and give a TRIGGER WARNING for this review. The triggering content will be in a spoiler, but I want to make readers aware beforehand.

This is the third book in Galen’s Lord and Lady Spy series. Each book takes a very familiar spy story and gives it a historical romance spin. The first book, Lord and Lady Spy, is a take on Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The second book, True Spies, is (I believe) a take on True Lies, though I’ve never seen the movie.

This particular one, Love and Let Spy, features a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heroine named Jane Bonde. I’m sure you can guess what spy story this is.

Jane Bonde is an orphan and was taken in at a young age and trained to be a spy. The father figure in her life, also a spy, wants to marry her off because she can’t be a spy forever. Our hero, Dominic Griffyn, is a bastard. His mother, a formerly sought-after woman, has remarried, giving Dom several golden-haired stepbrothers. His mother and stepfather hope to marry him off, in order to stem his bed-hopping shenanigans.

For the initial three-quarters of the book, I was fine. Truthfully, I found the story a little boring. We’re reminded every few pages how blue Jane’s eyes are and how much she excels at being a spy. The scenes she has with Dominic are often prompted by him annoyingly inserting himself into the situation. For example, Jane is out at night, on her way to meet two other spies, Lord and Lady Smythe from the first book in the series. Dominic sees her at night and insists on escorting her to wherever she’s going. He later admits that he just does this to piss her off. But I just found it childish. This happens more than once – Jane asking him to leave and Dominic refusing. He tags along and things go awry. Rinse and repeat. At this point, I was probably sitting around a C grade.

Then we get to the hero’s backstory. Throughout the book, it’s alluded that Dominic doesn’t have traditional dealings with women, at least not in the sexual sense. He’s not a fan of being touched. It doesn’t seem that serious, until he gets sexy with Jane in a stable, she touches him, and it triggers what can only be labeled as PTSD.

Spoiler/Trigger Warning (highlight text to read): When Dominic was a child and his mother was an actress of sorts, one of her suitors came into his room at night and raped him. This happened when he was four. Four fucking years old. Later on, another suitor forced him to perform oral sex, which is when his mother discovered the abuse. If I assume Dominic is in his late twenties, he’s been carrying this trauma for over two decades.

Up until this point, the book was relatively light-hearted. But this sort of bombshell came out of nowhere and it didn’t fit with the overall plot at all. No care was given to this as a legitimate plot device and seemed thrown in, haphazardly, to explain away Dominic’s aversion to contact. And it really rubbed me the wrong way. Then add in the fact that being with the heroine seemed to cure him in little less than a month.

“She’d been patient with him these past few weeks as the last of his rules slipped away. Now he felt only slightly edgy when she touched him, as she right now, her hand resting on his chest beside her cheek. The feel of her hands on him had become more comforting and arousing than triggers to the past.”

Dominic does go on to say that he still has nightmares from time to time, but I’m not buying that 20+ years of dealing with this trauma could be healthily coped with in a matter of weeks. No way. I'm not saying this sort of exposition and backstory can't be included in books or that I don't want to read certain books if they do include it. But there's a finesse, I think, to using it and writing it. The way it was dealt with didn't belie the gravity of what happened to Dominic. 

There were other things that nagged at me, like Jane’s rather waffling characterization. She seems to take pride in what she does, but then goes on to admit she hates that she was made into a spy. But it was Dominic that really sunk this book for me. His backstory actually made me angry.

I’m not saying that many won’t find this book an enjoyable addition to the Lord and Lady Spy series, but we all have certain reading buttons, ones that instantly take us out of a reading experience. This was one of those instances for me as a reader.

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