Lauren Willig (That Summer; The Other Daughter) has wrapped up her enjoyable Pink Carnation series with another excellent entry.
In The Lure of the Moonflower, which finishes the story begun 12 books earlier in The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, the intrepid British agent Pink Carnation (otherwise known as Miss Jane Wooliston), finally gets a love story of her own.
Jane is in Portugal, desperately attempting to find the queen, who was spirited away when the rest of the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil as Napoleon's troops invaded. In spite of all her other espionage-related talents, the Pink Carnation doesn't speak Portuguese. She turns for assistance to the notorious Moonflower, aka Jack Reid. Jack is an Anglo-Indian turned French agent, then turned back into British spy, and Jane can only hope that his assistance is reliable.
With a dour and wintry Portuguese setting, The Lure of the Moonflower isn't quite as frothy as some of the other books in the series. But it includes Willig's characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor, and the framing modern story, which continues the shenanigans of Eloise, academic researcher of early 19th-century espionage, is sure to make readers laugh out loud. Something like Bridget Jones meets The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Lure of the Moonflower is a must-read for lovers of chick lit and historical fiction. With tidy conclusions to Eloise's modern-day romance and to Jane's escapades nearly two centuries earlier, The Lure of the Moonflower is a fitting finale for a fun series. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm