Review: The Oxford Guide to Scandals & Lies
I've mentioned before that most of the cozy mysteries I read are set in Great Britain in the years before World War I and World War II. That is partly because the queen of cozy mysteries began writing then and set many of her books in that time period. But it also because that period of time was so pivotal in British and world events. It took Victoria Thompson's Gaslight Mysteries series to get me to dive deeper in the late Victorian age in the United States, the era before the first world war.
The Oxford Guide to Scandals & Lies by Kate Westbury takes the reader in the other direction in history to the time of the Cold War after the second world war. Two vastly different students at Oxford University are paired up to work for MI5 (the UK's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency). The Honorable Ginerva Bishop is a former debutante who is studying at Oxford just like her mother did before her. She's also at Oxford to avoid her father with whom she has a tumultuous relationship Sidney Braithwaite is from a small mining town and worked for their MI5 overseer previously in WWII. The British version of the G.I. Bill helped him escape the mines when he came back from the war. The two of them are thrown together when a school librarian dies mysteriously and turns out to be an agent taking down a Soviet spy at the university. Their task is to take over the work of the deceased librarian and suss out who the spy really is.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have thought about it frequently since I finished it. I noticed that some other reviewers mistakenly thought it was going to be a thriller because it was about spies. It's not. It's a cozy mystery that happens to be about spies. There are no car chases or big gun fights. There is lots of tailing suspects and breaking into rooms and offices to discover information. There are just enough twists and turns to keep you interested and the big twist at the end is truly big.
The Oxford Guide to Scandals & Lies will be released on September 1st but you can preorder now from your favorite independent bookstore or reserve from your local library.
4 lattes out of 5
Disclaimer: This ARC was provided by St. Martin's Press and Minotaur Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
