Rating: 4.5 stars
Thank you to Avon and Netgalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own.
Official plot summary:
Ten years ago, they joined the CIA.
Six years ago, he left the game.
Five years ago, they fell in love.
One year ago, she ran out into the cold with absolutely no intention of ever coming back.
And two minutes ago, they woke up, bloody and bruised and handcuffed together in the dark.
They don’t know where they are. They don’t know how they got there. And they have absolutely no idea who is after them or what this nameless, faceless villain wants.
The only thing that’s clear is that, after ten years of covers and chemistry, secrets and lies, these two rival spies have been sucked into their greatest mission yet, and now they’re going to have to team up to stay alive. (If they don’t kill each other first.)
Ten years ago, Alex and King enroll in "spy school" together and become instant rivals. King is basically a legacy recruit, with his grandparents and father absolutely legendary in spy circles. Alex wants adventure and a challenge and getting away from her constant guilt of being the healthy twin, while her sister had multiple heart surgeries and ended up very frail because Alex took up too much space in the womb. She's got a lot ofissues, and she'd rather cut herself off from her entire family to live a life of constant subterfuge rather than properly deal with them.
While Alex and King are bitter rivals, they also clearly do excellent work together, with the result that they keep being paired up on missions, where both of them staunchy ignore their amazing chemistry and mutual attraction to continue their weird feud. As the summary reveals, they eventually admit their feelings for one another. However, after Alex' twin sister is kidnapped by sinister forces who believe her to be Alex (not knowing that Alex had an identical twin in the first place), she is prepared to drop everything to go rescue her twin. King, being the more cautious of the two wants her to take some time and make a plan, resulting in an argument where foolish things like "If you leave now, never come back" are uttered, and actually believed.
So for a whole year, King has been desperately searching for Alex to apologise and win her back, while Alex has hidden herself away so well that no one knows where she's been. They wake up handcuffed together, with no memory of the previous 48 hours, and need to use all of their wits and skills to figure out why they've been tricked into a trap of some sort, who is behind it and how they are going to get the best of their mysterious enemies.
The story is told mostly in alternating chapters set in the present, where Alex and King are in a strange and very dangerous situation, and trying to figure out what the heck is going on, while also trying to process all their hurt feelings about the last time they saw each other, and the past, starting with the evening before Alex goes to "spy school" and first meets King, who tries to warn her off a career in espionage. As the book progresses, we skip between the present and get glimpses into the past ten years, in especially significant points of Alex and King's relationship, seeing their relationship develop slowly from rivals to reluctant allies to friends to lovers.
As someone who loves a good spy story (in book, TV or movie form), this book was exactly my wheelhouse. It's action packed and features all sorts of exciting spy scenarios, but if Alex and King weren't such engaging protagonists, I don't think it would have mattered what the plot turned out to be. By alternating between the present and the past, Ms. Carter keeps gradually showing the readers how the couple's relationship came to be, and why it was such a dramatic thing for Alex to cut off all contact with King for a whole year. The couple are clearly much better together than apart, but have both had complicated lives and steamer trunks full of emotional and psychological baggage that make it hard for them to actually believe anyone could love them or want a life with them.
This is the second book in the series, but works perfectly well as a standalone. In fact, I hadn't read the first one when I got this ARC, and rather went back and read the first book, The Blonde Identity, once I was done with this one. That book gives us the POV of Alex's twin sister who is on a breakneck adventure through Europe, while suffering memory loss, and the handsome spy who is trying to keep her from being captured by rival spy factions or killed.
If you like action and suspense and prickly rivals becoming each other's perfect partners, this is a fast and entertaining read. I highly recommend it.
Judging a book by its cover: I am frequently very critical of the cartoony covers, but there are exceptions to the rule, and this is one of them. This image is really nicely stylized and it would not be as charming or effective if there were real people on the cover. Then it would just look sort of naff. The colour choices, the cat's eye sunglasses, the reflection in the glasses, our heroine looking so very cool - it all works for me.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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