This is the third in the Mary Quinn series, set seven months after the second book.

It is 1860 and we find Mary assigned as a housemaid to the home of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. It seems there have been several petty thefts and, while Her Majesty wants to get to the bottom of it, she does not want a fuss made.

As an experienced graduate of the Agency, Mary is clever, resourceful, and ambitious. Frustratingly, after seven weeks on the job, she is no further ahead in finding the thief. Just as she is about to leave the case, Mary is drawn into a more serious event involving the royal heir. Prince Bertie was present at the murder of a nobleman friend while both were where they should not have been. What she eventually finds out is shocking and causes her to make several life-altering decisions.

Meanwhile, heir apparent Prince Bertie’s melancholic behaviour over the last few months has been concerning to the Queen; and, there is ultra-secret sewer work being performed under Buckingham Palace. Coincidentally, who should be in charge of this particular engineering project?

These four threads are not developed equally well. There is too much going on – petty thefts, the nobleman’s murder, Prince Bertie’s behaviour, the sewer work, Mary’s search for her past, her relationship with James Easton – and they don’t tie together smoothly, including a reimagining of Queen Victoria as Regina ex machina. The sewer “tunnel mystery” of the title is slight and feels a bit forced, particularly in its resolution.

This book, out of the three in the series, most clearly show its YA roots – two of the crimes are serious, involving complex political themes, but are treated too superficially, with implausibly tidy endings. There was more effort spent on Mary’s character development and deliberations about her options for her future.

The book read like the end of a trilogy, providing closure to many issues and circumstances. Therefore, the tension in this book comes not, as in the previous two, from the mysteries themselves but from “knowing” this is the third book in a trilogy, so anything could happen to the main characters.

The book makes use of our knowledge of the time period and the two royal characters - Queen Victoria, and Prince Bertie, after whom the Edwardian era was named. He was known to have a tremendous appetite for pleasure – smoking, horseracing, drinking, adultery. He is still 41 years away from becoming King Edward VII, and one year before the death of his father, Prince Albert.

Mary confronts her past a bit in the second book (The Body at the Tower) regarding her half-Chinese heritage. In this book, there is a deeper exploration and confrontation that takes up a larger percentage of the novel and gives interesting insight into the precarious position of people who were "passing" in that society.

The “side story” about Prince Bertie’s behaviour is used to highlight the powerlessness, helplessness, and dependent nature of female servants to the good manners and proper behaviour of their employers, the hypocritical emphasis on having a “good character” in their servants though they themselves can get away with much more. The series is not so dark that we have any doubt as to how this plot diversion will end. Therefore, it feels forced and doesn’t add to the story. The distraction would have been put to better use in fleshing out one of the other plots.

In the division between plot and character development, the first book skewed strongly towards plot, the second book was more balanced between the two, and this book skews strongly towards character, to the detriment of the various mystery plots. Of the four plot threads, I felt the plot of the title is the weakest.

Even though we know our resourceful heroine will land on her feet, how she gets there and the surprising twists and turns along the way make for a good read.

The emerging romance between Mary and James Easton is the most fun part of the book. It shows how a well-balanced relationship between two strong characters can become deep and caring. Lee needs to be careful not to sacrifice a strong plot to a series of polemics on the plight of the working classes in 1860s London.

The next in the series is Rivals in the City, and I am anxious to see how things evolve for the resourceful couple.


Rating: 4 out of 5 for character development; overall 3 out of 5 due to weakness of mysteries/plots
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Things are going missing at Buckingham Palace, so Mary is undercover as a domestic! Much like a visual novel detective story though, this seems like a rather low stakes assignment... until the Prince of Wales is witness to a murder and a lady-in-waiting behaves oddly. Mary must also face her past to figure things out, and it's one of my favorite things in this series that a mixed-raced identity is in a historical setting, but also treated as it would be in said era.

This is also unintentionally the second book I've read this summer where Queen Victoria plays a relevant plot role, haha- just at different ages.

Potential reader triggers: threat of sexual assault, suggestion of prostitution, drug use, [hazy] description of a murder. ( )

This is the third book in “The Agency” series, a charming blend of mystery and romance set in Victorian England London in the late 1850s.

For the previous six weeks Mary Quinn, now a fully-trained detective with the Agency - a secret spy ring used by the police as well as private clients - has been posted undercover at the palace of Queen Victoria as an upper housemaid. Small ornaments and trinkets were going missing at the palace, and there were no obvious suspects. But after nearly six weeks at the palace, Mary had heard nothing of use about the thefts.

As the story begins, the police come to tell the queen that her 18-year-old son, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, has been involved in a scandal. Albert had been out drinking and carousing with the less than “Honorable” Ralph Beaulieu-Buckworth.

The police stated that Prince Albert and Ralph went to an opium den and an altercation ensued; Ralph was stabbed by a Chinese Lascar named Jin Hai Lang. [A lascar was a sailor or militiaman from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Arab world, British Somaliland, or other land east of the Cape of Good Hope, who was employed on European ships from the 16th century until the middle of the 20th century. You can learn more about Lascars here.]

Mary, overhearing this, was in shock. This was her father’s name, her father who was supposedly lost at sea when she was a small child. Moreover, as she mused in the author’s way of recapping Mary’s background:

“His death was the reason she and her mother had suffered so. The bone-deep cold and perpetual hunger. Her mother’s desperate turn to prostitution, and, not long after, her death. Mary’s own years on the streets, keeping alive as a pickpocket and housebreaker. The inevitable arrest and trial, and the certainty of death - so very close that she’d all but felt the noose about her neck. And then, miraculously her rescue. The women of the Agency had given her life anew. Mary Lang, the only child of a Chinese sailor and an Irish seamstress, was gone forever. She’d been reborn as Mary Quinn, orphan. Educated at Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls. Trained as an undercover agent. An exciting, hopeful, active life had lain before her. Until this morning.”

Lang will presumably be executed as a traitor, but Mary is determined to find out first, if he is in fact her father, and second, if he is really guilty. With chutzpah and imagination she manages to do all that while at the same time, solving the mystery of the missing items, as well as reuniting with James Easton, the handsome engineer with whom she collaborated in previous books.

Evaluation: The author takes the unusual and courageous step of making the plot realistic rather than romanticized. Mary’s love/hate exploration of her identity (as a hated “half-breed”) is well-done, the history integrated into the story is interesting, and the chemistry between James and Mary is sparkling. The intrigue and tension-building will keep readers turning the pages. I look forward to the next book in the series. ( )

So, these are pure unadulterated crack, and are as addictive as the opium found in the opening scene of this book. Mary, now a full agent of the Agency, is posing as a parlor maid in Buckingham Palace to investigate a series of thefts. In between pouring tea for Queen Victoria, helping her roommate advance her romance with one Mr. Jones, and dealing with the suspicions of the head housekeeper, she learns the Crown Prince was witness to a murder in an opium den. The suspected murderer being a Lascar who bears the same name as Mary's dead father.

Mary finally gets some closure as to her past, and while her eventual meeting with her father could have been all Disney songs and rainbows, I'm really glad it wasn't. Because that would not have fit.

There were a lot of things that were tied up in this book, and enough strings still left dangling to keep me reading.

Also, you get baddass Queen Victoria. Really, what more could a girl ask for? ( )

Plucky girl spy solves two mysteries in Victorian London while resolving steamy romance. Great story, but I didn’t realize that it was the third book – wish I’d started with book one. ( )