The Agency: A Spy in the House (review)

Saved from the gallows by headmistress Anne Treleaven of Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls, twelve-year-old Mary Quinn flourishes in her studies, but by age seventeen, she is dissatisfied with the career paths open to genteel single young ladies in the mid-nineteenth century. Miss Treleaven is ready with a better offer—join the spy ring she runs from a hidden room in the academy, providing discreet espionage services to respectable employers who realize that nobody is in a better position to gather sensitive information than a woman whose social position makes her virtually invisible. Mary's first assignment is to get the goods on Mr. Thorold, a merchant suspected by the British government of smuggling Indian artifacts. She goes undercover as a companion to Thorold's spoiled daughter, Angelica, who is toying with a string of suitors and resisting her parents' efforts to marry her off. Mary finds herself the object of romantic attention as well, and when she's not scaling walls and subduing guard dogs, she's pouring tea, fending off the advances of Thorold's aide, and trying with little success to avoid losing her heart to James Easton, who is spying on Thorold for reasons of his own. Woven throughout the cloak-and-dagger play is plenty of flirtatious repartee, and even the most perilous of adventures is leavened with a comic edge that winks at the mystery genre. Yee's not above borrowing from her literary predecessors, and if Angelica's clandestine wedding has already been done by Conan Doyle in "A Scandal in Bohemia," and Lord Peter Wimsey already established the benefit of sending an easily overlooked female a-sleuthing, it's still all in good fun. A big reveal concerning Mary's parentage adds a note of social criticism and promises to loom even larger in the following two volumes of the planned trilogy, which newly minted fans will itch to get their hands on.