Spies in Romance: The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy

While the political world plays yet another round of Where In the World Is Edward Snowden (is he in Moscow? Ecuador? Narnia?), let’s take a look at some romantic heroes and heroines who play the spy game much more successfully—and with more time for sexy assignations:
The Black Hawk, Joanna Bourne. The fourth in Bourne’s series of historical romances set during the Napoleonic wars, The Black Hawk follows English spy Adrian Hawker and French secret agent Justine as they meet as children, spar and fall in love as teenagers, and then, as adults, are reunited by a murderous plot. Bourne weaves an intricate, engrossing story with an ear for language that makes you feel like you’re in an abandoned Paris café, hiding from enemy troops.
His at Night, Sherry Thomas. We’re very used to spy heroes being the smartest, most suave and ruthless men in the room—picture James Bond, crossed with Michael Fassbender. Yet Thomas’s hero, Lord Vere, has been running a years-long con to keep his cover as an agent of the crown: he pretends to be a bumbling idiot. Heroine Elissande is taken in by Vere’s rambling idiocy and hopes to trap this dimwit into marriage, so she can escape her vicious uncle’s custody. Safes are cracked, rats are smuggled into manor homes, and other high-class hijinks ensue.
Winter Garden, Adele Ashworth. Ashworth’s Madeleine is a rare historical romance heroine in that she’s chosen to stay unmarried and childless in favor of pursuing a career—as a British spy. And not only does she own her sexuality, but she is the aggressor in the book’s central relationship. It’s telling that Winter Garden is set in 1849, several decades after the Regency period. The societal upheavals the country was undergoing contribute both to the lower stakes of the case the spies are pursuing (no preventing Napoleon’s assassination for Madeleine) and to the ease with which Madeleine inhabits a role that for a woman would have been unthinkable even twenty years earlier. Really, Winter Garden is as much about how it’s okay to be passionate about your career as it is a love story. Although it’s pretty damn steamy, too.
Loose Lips, Claire Berlinski. Girl meets CIA. Girl meets boy. Girl falls in love with boy—who might also be a Soviet double agent. From there it’s just a short leap for Sanskrit scholar–turned–spook Selena Keller to start using her espionage skills on her possibly traitorous boyfriend. Berlinski is a journalist, and her experience covering world affairs shows in her first novel, which yanks its narrator, an academic who worries that her college pot-smoking will get her rejected by the agency, from New York to the CIA’s training facility to the hot, crowded streets of Mysore, India.
I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You, Ally Carter. Hogwarts for girl spies. Need to hear more? The first in Carter’s Gallagher Girls series introduces Cammie Morgan, daughter of two legendary operatives, one of whom is now the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women. Cammie and her roommates (a code-breaking genius and one of the world’s preeminent hand-to-hand fighters, naturally, plus the petulant but brilliant daughter of a senator) learn to bug rooms, go through garbage looking for clues, and shadow a mark—and then they focus their skills on cute, unsuspecting civilian boys. The series, winding up with a sixth book in September, is fizzy and fun and will make you want to learn how to use a mascara wand to pick a lock.
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein. Wein’s young adult novel, narrated partly by a Scottish spy captured by the Nazis in 1943 France and partly by her pilot best friend, is the story of two girls brought together by an insane war. Intelligence officer “Verity” and airwoman Maddie tell how they came to crash in the French countryside, with spy Verity falling into the hands of the Gestapo. Darkly witty and devastatingly emotional in its depiction of a young friendship more intense than most romances, it most definitely does not make concessions to a younger audience. The book is vibrantly detailed and tackles the spy experience from the angle of what happens when tradecraft becomes a desperate bargain for survival.