No Longer a Gentleman by Mary Jo Putney

The Lost Lords, Book 4

Synopsis: Grey Sommers, Lord Wyndham, never met a predicament he couldn’t charm his way out of. Then a tryst with a government official’s wife during a bit of casual espionage in France condemns him to a decade in a dungeon, leaving him a shadow of his former self. Yet his greatest challenge may be the enigmatic spy sent to free his body—the only woman who might heal his soul.
Cassie Fox lost everything in the chaos of revolution, leaving only a determination to help destroy Napoleon’s empire through her perilous calling. Rescuing Grey is merely one more mission. She hadn’t counted on a man with the stark beauty of a ravaged angel, whose desperate courage and vulnerability thaw her frozen heart. But a spy and a lord are divided by an impassable gulf even if they manage to survive one last, terrifying mission….

Review: I was very curious to try another volume in this series after spending a great time with the first one. This is Volume 4, but fear not, there’s really no problem reading it separately from the others as each couple highlighted in the novels is different. I admit that I was expecting a lot from this story, hoping that it would be at the height of the first one, but even though I found it a bit below, I had a good time.

Cassie Fox is a halt-French half-English spy in a time when war raged between the two countries. She is very good at disguising herself, to pass incognito and thus act when the need is felt. Her skills will send her after an English Lord who has been missing for 10 years, locked in a tower and left to die there. Yet it does not take much to the young woman to save him and help him back to England. But it’s also like that that a story begins to develop between them, evolving over the chapters. This relationship will also allow the woman to recover some of her past, but they may well be forced to return to France to save another of their friends.

As I said, I was pretty excited to discover this new story, but it’s true that I was a little disappointed because I was expecting to be completely swept away. Finally I do not know, but I did not feel the passion between the two characters and I found that we didn’t have much happening for a book such as this one. Maybe I have not really thought that our Lord could return to a fairly normal life after living reclusive and locked up in a prison such as this one for a decade. After that, I’m not saying this is not good because the author writes very well and it was lovely to read it but I thought we would have a little more. However it was interesting to learn more about Cassie and find out who she really was.

It was a good novel even if it is a tone below the one I loved but I’m curious to read more in this series!