Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction, mystery
Review: Maggie Hope just cannot catch a break. In her latest adventure, she finds herself a prisoner of SOE and MI6 because she knows too much. She and other highly trained agents are being held in relative comfort on a remote island in the Hebrides. That there was such a "cooler" in a remote part of Scotland is historical fact. One can only hope that the agents who were actually held did not have to deal with a murderer picking them off one at a time (a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which gets a shout-out (under its original name) at the beginning of the book), or a Nazi spy. You would think that with all that going, there would be a lot of tension in this book, but you would be wrong. Someone dies, they all gasp, but remind themselves that they are not only British (stiff upper lip, old thing) but also trained agents, so they must just soldier on. We hear Maggie's interior monologue that reminds us that she's so scared and just wants to go home, and that she's a trained agent and can handle this, and she steps forward and takes charge of the situation and tries to calm everyone else's fears (frankly, most of the others don't act like trained agents). And then someone else is murdered and they all repeat the process. Oh, and there's a couple of really enormous red herrings.
This is definitely not the strongest book in the Maggie Hope series, but, as always, I look forward to seeing what MacNeal gets Maggie up to next.
FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.
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