Library's review
Kendra Donovan is an FBI agent in present-day America. She is part of a multi-agency raid on a terrorist hideout that goes awry, with bullets flying everywhere and people screaming and dying by the handful. That's the point where I nearly gave up on it, because it seemed so ridiculously like every other bog-standard espionage thriller. I mean, the kind of stuff Nelson DeMille probably writes in his sleep, only without the racism.
Fortunately, I kept reading and the book improved dramatically when — through a rather strained MacGuffiny device — Kendra finds herself transported back to Regency England, where she finds herself living in the home territory of a serial killer of young prostitutes. She brings all her 21st century knowledge to bear on the problem while trying to avoid the suspicions of the Duke and other assorted aristocracy that she's landed amongst, who wonder just who she is and how she knows what she knows.
All in all, the 19th century mystery is entertaining. It's fun to see uber-agent Donovan try to solve a crime without having the modern crutches of DNA analysis, computer searches, and X-rays. And if the dialogue sometimes sounds like the author swallowed Georgette Heyer's entire oeuvre and then spit it back up on on her word processor's screen, well ... she could have had worse source material to draw from.
If you like murder mysteries, and you like Heyer's Regency works, you'll probably find this one to your liking.
Note: This book was offered as a Big Library Read by Overdrive, which is a program that allows unlimited downloads of a select ebook across all libraries that use Overdrive. The last book I read from this program was [Shakespeare Saved My Life]. There have been others since but none of them appealed to me.
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Fiction. Literature. Mystery. Historical Fiction. HTML: When brilliant FBI agent Kendra Donovan stumbles back in time and finds herself in a 19th century English castle under threat from a vicious serial killer, she scrambles to solve the case before it takes her lifeâ??200 years before she was even born. Beautiful and brilliant, Kendra Donovan is a rising star at the FBI. Yet her path to professional success hits a speed bump during a disastrous raid where half her team is murdered, a mole in the FBI is uncovered and she herself is severely wounded. As soon as she recovers, she goes rogue and travels to England to assassinate the man responsible for the deaths of her teammates. While fleeing from an unexpected assassin herself, Kendra escapes into a stairwell that promises sanctuary but when she stumbles out again, she is in the same place - Aldrich Castle - but in a different time: 1815, to be exact. Mistaken for a lady's maid hired to help with weekend guests, Kendra is forced to quickly adapt to the time period until she can figure out how she got there; and, more importantly, how to get back home. However, after the body of a young girl is found on the extensive grounds of the county estate, she starts to feel there's some purpose to her bizarre circumstances. Stripped of her twenty-first century tools, Kendra must use her wits alone in order to unmask a cunning madm… (more)