Maggie Hope has failed out of spy school because she can’t keep up with the physical demands, as Princess Elizabeth’s Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal opens. However, Prime Minister Winston Churchill has another idea for her. Reports have come in that the Nazis have a plan to assassinate King George VI and kidnap the crown princess, Elizabeth, in order to install Edward VIII back on the throne. Churchill arranges for Maggie to take a position as math tutor to the princess while looking out for traitors and the safety of Elizabeth.
I thoroughly enjoyed getting to listen to be reunited with Maggie Hope and her friends while listening to Princess Elizabeth’s Spy. But this book spends less time with old friends and mostly makes new ones. Maggie meets some charming people while also dealing with some highly unpleasant ones. The characters do a lot to draw us into the book, and I appreciated seeing the increased strength in Maggie as she grows and learns more about being an undercover agent. She learns to take control over her own life despite the desire of her bosses to control her actions.
The action in this book was full of excitement and interesting drama and kept me drawn to the plot. My one complaint is that I spotted a couple plot points that seem to imitate stories in other sources. For example, the husband of a woman born in Germany who gets taken up by the authorities just for having been born in Germany complains to the king that a lady in waiting was also born in Germany. However, she was not arrested. Not long after the complaint, the lady in waiting gets killed while riding her horse with a wire strung across a pair of trees. This is almost exactly the plot of an episode in the first season of Foyle’s War. It disturbed me that this and at least one other plot point also imitated another source. I realize that authors can sometimes hit upon similar ideas randomly, but the details of this book are too similar to the other materials to be a complete coincidence, in particular because it happens more than once.
Susan Duerden performs the audio edition of this book. Using effective timing and inflections, Duerden makes the book seem all the more exciting, with a strong sense of when to hold back in intensity and when to heighten the drama. In addition, Duerden uses good accents for people of different regions, adding fun to the experience of listening to this book.
I had fun listening to Princess Elizabeth’s Spy and have now found a new series I plan to listen to. I feel invested in the life of Maggie and am eager to learn what will happen next in her life and spy career. I give this book four stars.
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