This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviewed at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at _@‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.

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This story manages to balance out its angst and brooding with a sense of humanity – but it’s one dark drink of water. Filled with mystery and angst, The Spy and the Nightingale keeps its suspense up while weaving a romance between its two lead characters that’s fraught with a million complications. The book is compelling as a mystery and a romance both, filled with intense emotion and smart people doing what they must to survive. With all of that dark drama comes a lot of yearning and a lot of waiting, but the storyline makes it a worthwhile exercise in patience.

Scottish widow Isobel Graham is swimming against a sea of emotional pain and trauma. She lost her husband, James, at Waterloo and has remained behind in France, busying herself tending the wounded after following behind her husband’s camp.

Now her beloved sister Lucy Muir has been kidnapped by a man who would use her ill. With both of their parents dead, Isobel fears that she will lose Lucy, too. She also worries her sibling will be sold into the sex slavery trade due to the intel she’s managed to pay for from private investigators and dig up by herself, and only knows that Lucy’s been taken to Paris. The Napoleonic War has been over for a year, but its effects continue to echo through society. Out of desperation, she goes to France, the name of an ally on her lips.

Lieutenant Nathaniel Blackmore is a British spy who has no idea what’s going on when Isobel faints in his arms, saying she’s looking for him. Nathaniel is out there looking for an Englishman named Jeremiah Compton who betrayed his country to the French cause and bust up the trafficking ring he’s been accused of running. But Nathaniel knows he can’t just leave the obviously distressed woman to lie in a gutter once he figures out she’s not a spy. He tries to worm Isobel’s story out of her and quickly learns that Lucy has likely been victimized by Jeremiah.

Nathaniel and Isobel team up to track down both Jeremiah and — with luck — Lucy. They dive into various socially-disreputable hells to do so: gambling halls, drug dens and brothels. Isobel must join the spy game to do so, and she does it with great dignity and determination. They find themselves sharing beds for convenience, which morphs into their agreeing to a sex-and-nothing-more relationship, and getting closer and closer together as they bond. But there are many secrets lying between them, and Isobel is still mourning Jamie. Is there any hope they’ll be able to find love together?

The burn here is in slow motion for many reasons. It takes a good long while for Nathaniel and Isobel to learn how to trust each other, and the book knows how to play with that tension and does it brilliantly. Some readers won’t be able to accept how quickly Isobel moves on from Jamie, even as her grief tints her reactions to Nathaniel. I was mainly able to accept it myself, though sometimes it felt like they were moving at a breakneck pace that would then slow down so we could watch them melt and seethe at each other.

The marriage between Isobel and Jamie is portrayed as a very happy one, and here she is a year later, having wild sex with a new man. Nathaniel and Isobel are good people, however. They have to go to some very dark places together to find the truth, and the book isn’t sparing about the ugliness they must face. In the end they only have each other to rely on, making their bond read as properly sensible to the one following it.

It’s nice to meet with a widow who actually loved and misses and respects her first husband. Isobel is single-minded: she wants her sister back, she has nothing left, and she will do anything to achieve her goal. Nathaniel shows her there’s more to life than revenge, but he’s got plenty of war wounds of his own – literal and emotional. He’s highly controlled, but a caring man who has put away emotion to focus on his work. Isobel awakens him to the softer side of life, and he struggles with being honest and letting her in. They have way too many reasons not to fall in love, and it’s sort of a miracle that they do. They’re both experienced people who have scars, and have lives behind them, and the book isn’t afraid to explore what that means for their love story.

The mystery of Lucy and what’s happened to her is surprising, and both Isobel and Nathaniel have to work hard to get to the core of the problem. The book is definitely one part investigation, one part romance, so make sure you bring patience to the table if you’re only here for the love story. There is a love story here, even though both parties involved in it are extremely reluctant to actually allow themselves to fall into a romance. It’s worthwhile and sweet, even if it feels sudden in retrospect after so much tension and inner thought from our hero and heroine.

The book does slow down toward the last quarter and settle into a period of mending and healing, which both Nathaniel and Isobel desperately need. The fate of Lucy is left open for a sequel; I’m looking forward to reading it after all of the horrors she suffered through in this volume. The Spy and the Nightingale is a three-hanky affair with a number of quirks that make for a reading experience that is both heartbreaking and heartening.