I almost forgot that I finished this book on the plane the other day. I’ve been reading it on and off for a few months in the in-between times, and the reason it took so long is because it’s pretty bad! It’s pretty bad!
M. C. Beaton is, of course, dead now, so this R. W. Green person is continuing her two enormously successful book series. I mean, successful commercially. I don’t think this series was very good even when Beaton was alive, but it had its charms. Green tries to emulate Beaton’s pell-mell ADHD writing style, but he’s just not that good at it. Instead he resorts to dropping in Wikipedia excerpts whenever he has to describe something in Scotland, and he tries to make more “respectable” plots than Beaton ever bothered to. So here we have spies and drug gangs and American agents and eh.
It’s really bad, and I’m never reading one of these zombie series again.
Death of a Spy (2024) by M. C. Beaton and R. W. Green (buy new, 3.81 on Goodreads)