Book Review: Spies and Prejudice

Author: Talia Vance

Publication Date: June 11, 2013
Publisher: Egmont USA

Fields’ Rule #1: Don’t fall for the enemy.

Berry Fields is not looking for a boyfriend. She’s busy trailing cheaters and liars in her job as a private investigator, collecting evidence of the affairs she’s sure all men commit. And thanks to a pepper spray incident during an eighth grade game of spin the bottle, the guys at her school are not exactly lining up to date her, either.

So when arrogant—and gorgeous—Tanner Halston rolls into town and calls her “nothing amazing,” it’s no loss for Berry. She’ll forget him in no time. She’s more concerned with the questions surfacing about her mother’s death.

But why does Tanner seem to pop up everywhere in her investigation, always getting in her way? Is he trying to stop her from discovering the truth, or protecting her from an unknown threat? And why can’t Berry remember to hate him when he looks into her eyes?

With a playful nod to Jane Austen, Spies and Prejudice will captivate readers as love and espionage collide.

Here we go. I savor the surge of adrenaline that comes whenever I’m close to getting the evidence I need.

 

These guys are going to our high school? God help them then. They’d be better of knowing a posse of bodyguards to keep all the swooning girls away.

 

Kennedy Patton and her entourage, which consists entirely of girls named after dead American Presidents, move in. Reagan, Madison, and Taylor form a semicircle around Tanner, an impenetrable wall of miniskirts and high heels. Tanner nods, but still scans the crowd over their heads while they chatter.

Strawberry “Berry” Fields loves what she does. She works for her dad, who runs an investigation firm where she gets to track her mark and capture pictures of them for a spouse or cheated employer. She is pretty good at it too and has quite a sharp intuition. She knows better than to get involved in the dating scene, and quite frankly she feels its best that she has sworn off boys. Until Tanner Halston walks into her life for reasons unknown to her. Berry’s life takes some unexpected twists and turns after she first meets Tanner, and is it just a coincidence that when Tanner walks into her life she starts to find out things about her mother’s death? Things that may not point to it being a suicide like the police suspected?

 

This book was compared to a mixture of Veronica Mars and Pride and Prejudice, so of course I am going to read it, right?! Yes! Just like both of the publications mentioned above, Spies and Prejudice features a strong female lead, Berry Fields, whom I loved. Berry is not your average teenage girl. She doesn’t really care about boys, she is obsessed with helping her father investigate the cases they receive, and she wants nothing more than to understand her mother’s death. Berry was a character that I pictured having a “stone face.” Nothing really phased her and she put her job and her investigations before anything else. Plus she was extremely witty, which is always a win for me when I am reading female leads!

 

This book was very suspenseful and hard to put down, especially after we were introduced to Berry’s deceased mother and the story behind her tragic death. Talia Vance writes the chapters by ending them in cliffhangers, and this makes it almost impossible to put the book down. I got up at 6:00 a.m. today just to finish this book. I will say that the reason the book did not receive 5 cupcakes is because with quite a bit left in the book I had already figured out what happened and I lost interest in the suspense. More than half of this book had me on the edge of my seat and I definitely recommend this to fans of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys because it definitely has that feel to it.

 

***A copy of this book was provided to me by the publishers at Egmont USA in exchange for my honest review***