Reviewed by Jess

TITLE: Eleventh Hour

SERIES: The Carstairs Affairs #1

AUTHOR: Elin Gregory

PUBLISHER: Manifold Press

LENGTH: 248 pages

RELEASE DATE:  August 1, 2016

BLURB:

Borrowed from the Secret Intelligence Service cipher department to assist Briers Allerdale – a field agent returning to 1920s London with news of a dangerous anarchist plot – Miles Siward moves into a ‘couples only’ boarding house, posing as Allerdale’s ‘wife’. Miles relishes the opportunity to allow his alter ego, Millie, to spread her wings but if Miles wants the other agent’s respect he can never betray how much he enjoys being Millie nor how attractive he finds Allerdale.

Pursuing a ruthless enemy who wants to throw Europe back into the horrors of the Great War, Briers and Miles are helped and hindered by nosy landladies, water board officials, suave gentlemen representing foreign powers and their own increasing attraction to each other.

Will they catch their quarry? Will they find love? Could they hope for both?

The clock is ticking.

REVIEW:

Good historical fiction needs both a believable setting and excellent characters to succeed, and this book has both, in addition to a good espionage plot and plenty of thrills along the way. I’m already a fan of this series!

We begin ten years after the end of World War I and Briers Allerdale, a former soldier and current field agent for the Secret Intelligence Service, finds himself taking on the role of undercover doting husband while he does ground work to foil a deadly terrorist plot. But he’s surprised to realize they aren’t pairing him with a female agent, but with Miles Siward, a tiny, fine-boned cipher agent who has excelled at masquerading as a woman in the past. Briers and Miles come from wildly different backgrounds, but they are both after the same goal—and they both realize their romantic tastes are inclined in the same direction.

For the bulk of the book, Briers and Miles get to know each other under their careful guises as a young married couple in a boarding house full of busybodies. Their target, a Balkan criminal mastermind, has his equally-sharp wife hiding out as a nanny across the street, so while Briers goes about town to dig up information, Miles stays at home and keeps watch. The façade proves to be all too easy to keep up, and the little kisses and touches come naturally to the two men, making their time alone a little tense. Miles is definitely into Briers, but he wants to be sure Briers wants Miles, not Millie—and of course, they have to keep an eye out for anyone who may want to sabotage them.

There’s so much to love about this story! It’s a tightly-written historical thriller that has perfect pacing and a clear end goal in mind. It proves that it is possible to write about tangled political intrigue and complex power dynamics without confusing the reader to the point of no return. Gregory has obvious love for the genre, and she inserts us so easily into the grimy sewers and low-lit streets of post-War London that the historical setting feels completely authentic, as if this was actually written in the 1920s. She also sets the stakes appropriately high. These are not men fiddling around with common criminals. Their work is a matter of state secrets and high-level terrorism, which makes their protectiveness over one another all the more potent.

The characters are all excellent, too, with Miles being the standout. I really enjoyed his relationship with his alter-ego, Millie, and the ways in which she empowers him. While he doesn’t find a sexual release from cross-dressing, he finds a different sort of energy. The world treats a confident woman differently than it would treat a small, meek man, and seeing him figure out those dynamics makes for a really interesting, unique read. He gets to experience things on all ends of the gender spectrum—both the freedoms and abuses of being male, female, and anything else. And his chemistry with Briers, who is more of a man’s man, so to speak, is totally electrifying—especially when Miles puts him in his place.

Stay turned for my forthcoming review of the second book in this series, Midnight Flit. I can’t wait to see where Gregory takes these characters and how she develops them and their relationships.

RATING:

BUY LINK: 

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