REVIEW: The Alias Agenda by Holly James
When confidential informant Erin Daniels is abruptly pulled off an insider trading investigation and sent across the country with just a few hours’ notice, she’s definitely not expecting her new assignment to involve infiltrating a smuggling ring in a . . . suburban mommy group? She’s also not expecting to meet a clumsy field agent who is hot as hell—or to hear that the man who handled her assignments for the last 10 years is dead.
Erin’s spent the last decade as a secret operative for the intelligence agency that arrested her con artist father—and ostensibly is keeping her safe from retribution. With her former handler the only constant in a life spent on the move, inserting herself into dangerous situations, Erin has to adjust to newcomer Cal Bray, and his sometimes-blundering attempts to protect her—all while trying to deny her growing attraction to him.
But before they can get too far into the mommy ring, a vengeful figure from Erin’s past reappears, bent on killing her—and coming uncomfortably close. Drawing on her years of experience and Cal’s best instincts, Erin is determined to exorcise her ghosts for good, and find out what a real life, on her own, is like—and if Cal is willing to lend a hand . . .
Dear Holly James,
I was excited by the blurb for The Alias Agenda and I like “spy romance” but what began with a promising start kind of went off the rails a bit for me. There were certainly parts to like but I ended up thinking the book didn’t quite know what wanted it to be.
Erin Daniels’ dad is a con man. When her mother died when Erin was 12, she became her dad’s sidekick, helping him run cons all over the country. She became very good at picking pockets and telling lies. When she was 18, she and her dad were pulling what he described as “one last” scam, to steal a very large diamond from some bad guys. However, things went awry when the FBI arrived. Her dad ended up in prison and Erin was offered a deal. Work for the DSA (“Directorate of Secret Affairs”) or go to prison like her dad. She took the deal.
For 10 years, her handler has been Agent Wallace. He tells her where to go, what do to and keeps her safe. He also keeps her (virtually) chained to the DSA. She can’t leave because the woman from whom she and her dad were stealing the diamond wants revenge – and her diamond back. No-one knows what happened to the diamond. It seems to have gone missing in the gunfire and confusion during their arrest. Erin doesn’t like working for the DSA but it’s not prison and at least she’s safe. Erin was not free and Wallace kept her carefully in the dark about certain things. While I understood Erin’s mixed feelings about Wallace, I ended up with far less sympathy for him than she did.
When Wallace abruptly pulls her off a case in New York and sends her to suburban LA, she’s surprised, but she does what she’s told. What she doesn’t expect is that Wallace turns up dead and she’s been assigned a new handler – Agent Calvin Bray.
In the blurb and for the first part of the book, Bray is a clumsy novice who makes mistakes all over the place. But he’s not really. It felt like, part way through the book, there was a realisation that no matter how hot he was, Erin would never fall for an idiot. So he suddenly became competent and clever. I didn’t buy the explanation for it. There were other things I didn’t buy also (his mother for one).
The case Erin is on in LA is about smuggling high-end baby products (prams, strollers etc) and I didn’t understand why the three mothers would become involved. Yes, their backgrounds did enable them to (mostly) successfully pull off criming for a period of time, but I didn’t understand why they started criming in the first place. That didn’t change over the book.
What starts as a case about baby products ends up as quite something else, each twist not quite adding up for me.
Bray and Erin did have good chemistry but did they actually fit together? I had questions.
I did enjoy the set piece at the end. It felt very cinematic. And the epilogue felt very Selena Kyle/Bruce Wayne – if I didn’t think about it too much. Unfortunately, as soon as I started thinking about it, things didn’t hold up all that well. To go into more detail would be too spoilery but suffice to say some of Erin’s choices in the end felt a clumsy as some of Bray’s early actions.
The Alias Agenda had the bones of a good story but it ended up feeling a bit like a lost opportunity for me.
Grade: C
Regards,
Kaetrin
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