Category: Lee, Y.S.

A Spy in the House by Y. S. Lee

A Spy in the House coverFrom the back cover:
Mary Quinn leads a remarkable life. At twelve, an orphan and convicted thief, she was miraculously rescued from the gallows. Now, at seventeen, she has a new and astonishing chance to work undercover for the Agency.

It is May 1858, and a foul-smelling heat wave paralyzed London. Mary enters a rich merchant’s household to solve the mystery of his lost cargo ships. But as she soon learns, the house is full of deceptions, and people are not what they seem—including Mary herself.

Review:
As a convicted thief, twelve-year-old Mary Lang is about to be executed when she is saved by the ladies of Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls. There, she receives an education and by the age of seventeen is teaching other students the skills they will need to be independent. Trouble is, she’s not satisfied and the few other career options open to her gender don’t interest her much, either. When she mentions this to the two women running the school, they suggest another alternative: the Agency.

The Agency is a covert organization of female spies, operating under the assumption that because women are presumed to be flighty and empty-headed, their agents will be able to retrieve information more easily than a man might, particularly in situations of domestic servitude. Mary quickly agrees, despite the threat of danger, and soon finds herself serving as paid companion to spoiled Miss Angelica Thorold, whose merchant father is suspected of dealing in stolen Hindu goods.

Mary (now using the surname Quinn) isn’t the lead on the investigation and isn’t supposed to actually do much of anything, but she gets antsy, and in the process of snooping meets James Easton. James’ older brother desperately wants to marry Angelica, but James has heard rumors about her father’s business practices, and so is doing some sleuthing of his own to determine whether a family connection would be unwise. He and Mary form a partnership and spend most of the book poking about in warehouses and rest homes for aging Asian sailors and following people on foot or in carriages while maintaining a flirty sort of bickering banter.

Author Y. S. Lee tries to make the mystery interesting, giving us a bit of intrigue between Angelica and her father’s secretary as a distraction, but ultimately it feels very insubstantial to me. Nothing much comes as a surprise and two story elements that could’ve been highlights—Mary’s month-long intensive training and Scotland Yard’s raid on the Thorold house—occur off camera! Too, Mary is harboring a secret about her parentage which is thoroughly obvious: she’s part Asian. Only towards the end did Lee actually make clear that Mary is keeping this a secret from others because of the foreigner bias of the time, and I must wonder whether the intended young adult audience was reading this going, “What’s the big deal?”

Not that it isn’t nifty to have a part-Asian heroine, of course. Mary is competent and level-headed, though I admit I did get irritated by how often she is favorably compared to “ordinary women,” who would scream or faint in situations in which Mary is able to keep her head. When a mystery stars a male sleuth, do we need to hear over and over how much smarter he is than the ordinary fellow? I don’t think so. On the flip side, the overall theme of the book seems to be “don’t understimate women,” and Mary finds time to inspire a scullery maid to seek out Miss Scrimshaw’s and to convince Angelica to pursue a musical career.

In the end, A Spy in the House is a decent read. It’s not perfect, but I still plan to read the second book in the trilogy in the near future.

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The Body at the Tower (Y.S. Lee)

The Plot
Mary Quinn was rescued at the age of twelve from the hangman’s noose by an enterprising group of women. Now educated and grown, she has been recruited by those same women to join a clandestine group of mercenary agents hired by Scotland Yard and other to investigate where official channels have turned up no results. Now a year on from her somewhat shakily executed first assignment, Mary’s latest case is a departure for even the Agency. Mary must disguise herself as a boy in order to infiltrate the building site at the Houses of Parliament and discover what she can about the suspicious death of a bricklayer.

My Thoughts
The Body at the Tower opens roughly a year after the events of the first Mary Quinn book, A Spy in the House. Mary is still working for the Agency, taking assignments and becoming more comfortable in her role as an investigator-slash-spy. Apparently, which I did not recall from the first book, she is not yet considered a full-fledged member of the Agency – though she is due for this promotion soon, as she’s slowly accumulated experience.

Mary’s latest assignment is one which is controversial within the Agency itself – she’s to go undercover at the building site of the Houses of Parliament, where they are working on completing St. Stephen’s Tower (what most people just call “Big Ben”). The building project is decades behind schedule, over-budget, and has been continually plagued by setbacks and bad-luck, leading to rumors of a curse or phantom. Certainly the latest incident, the death of a bricklayer, has not improved matters any. Scotland Yard wishes to know if the death was a suicide or homicide, so they have asked the Agency to investigate. Since the building site has zero opportunities for a female, Mary will have to disguise herself as a boy. It’s this latter step which creates friction between the two women who head the Agency – they disagree whether or not it’s a good idea to attempt expanding the business in this fashion.

In the meantime and hardly unexpectedly to the reader, James Easton has returned from his assignment in India and promptly finds himself tapped to perform his own audit of the building project. What saves this turn of events from being completely cliched is the fact that Easton does not return in health – in fact, he seems downright consumptive in the manner of the best Victorian heroines. (The official explanation is malaria; we’ll see if that turns out to be all it is.)

I found this second book in The Agency series to be much more brisk than the first – though Mary is no Sherlock, she is able to be a lot more proactive in this outing and eventually begins to piece things together. She finds herself on more even footing with Easton due to his physical weakness and her own increased confidence in her abilities, so their interactions are more interesting. And we’re introduced to a new character, the tabloid journalist Octavius Jones, who promises to be a nice addition to the cast, provided he shows up again!

My main concern, not of this book in particular, but of the series in general is that the books thus far have been fairly short. My fellow Tripletakers have noticed that many things which may have been quite interesting (Mary’s time at school, her time teaching, her training for the Agency) have been quickly glossed over or skipped entirely. Indeed, book 2 barely has time to return to the mysteries surrounding Mary’s father introduced in the first book. And – alarmingly – other reviews have referenced as fact that the Agency series was intended as a trilogy rather than an ongoing, open-ended (or simply longer) serial as I had initially supposed. I haven’t actually been able to confirm this at author Y.S. Lee’s website, but it seems to me that there is simply too much which needs to happen in book 3 to satisfactorily tie up all of the dangling threads. I fear being disappointed by the ending, so I rather hope book 3 is either considerably longer or not actually the end.

In Short
Now a more experienced investigator for the Agency, Mary Quinn’s second adventure moves along at a highly satisfactory pace. The setting and mystery are not at all similar to A Spy in the House, giving this book a different but still pleasing flavor. I’m left anticipating the third book in the series (The Traitor and the Tunnel), inexplicably (and aggravatingly!) due to be released in the US months after the UK edition arrives.

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