Book Review - Andrea Penrose's The Cocoa Conspiracy
Published by: NAL
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Paperback, 324 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy
Arianna still hasn't come quite to grips with the fact that she is the new Countess of Saybrook. Her marriage to Sandro seemed kind of expedient to get out of trouble. Sure, they rub along nicely, but what if he wakes up one day and realizes that an uneducated woman with a dodgy past from the West Indies isn't who he wanted to marry despite their shared love of chocolate? Therefore she will be the best wife she can be, and that means getting him a really spectacular birthday present. She ventures into the rarified air of Messrs. Harvey and Watkins Rare Book Emporium where she finds a book with the most exquisite engravings of Theocroma cacao. And the binding, the binding is like chocolate. Therefore she is more than shocked when a foreigner tries to wrest the book from her causing a scuffle in the store. She is victorious, but she wonders if the encounter was something more than a fanatical book collector not getting the prize he desired. When Sandro's uncle convinces the newlyweds to attend a county house party Arianna is shocked to find the man who attempted to steal her book in attendance. What's more, she thinks she's discovered why he wanted the book. As she prepares to wrap it she finds three sheets of papers slipped into the back binding. Two are encoded but one, a sensitive government document, points to Sandro's uncle as having possible links to the dangerous leak within the government, the spy known as Renard. There also happens to be an attempt on Sandro's life and a stranger is murdered at the house party. In other words, if they thought that the chaos that embodied their courtship was an aberration they are soon to find out they are sadly mistaken. To save his uncle's reputation Sandro agrees to a scheme devised by Grentham, Sandro and Arianna are to go to the Congress of Vienna. There Sandro will play the academic while Arianna will seduce the secrets out of the chief suspects. But what happens if Sandro realizes that he doesn't like risking his wife's life and reputation because he has come to hold her rather dear? Will it help or hinder their investigation?
For the longest time I felt utterly at sea with this volume of Arianna and Sandro's adventures. I had read the first volume, Sweet Revenge, only two weeks prior, and yet I couldn't figure out who the hell Renard was. Yes, I knew about the mole within the government aside from Grentham's aide who had an unfortunate encounter with Arianna's kitchen knives, so abstractly I wondered, could this be Renard? But my all consuming thought that kept repeating on a loop in my head was who the heck was Renard? I felt like I was going insane. Was I missing something like the recipe for Chocolate Coconut Cake that is at the beginning of the twelfth chapter? Because a cake isn't done when it's still just batter on the third step, where Renard just seemed to appear fully formed from nothing. Is Renard the equivalent of this cake? Skip a whole bunch of steps and voila, spy! I even went back and skimmed the previous volume for any reference to Renard and couldn't find one. So, if you know where the first mention of the name is I'd be very grateful to be told where it is, because I'm assuming it was omitted somehow.... So once I moved beyond Renard, just accepting their existence as a fait accompli, I was shocked that I found the house party kind of meh. I just love house parties. They are my catnip. When I read the blurb I was blah about the politics and Vienna and wild about the house party. But Andrea Penrose surprised me by taking the political machinations of the Congress and making it so much more. This was like a country house party on crack. The party was just bigger, grander, and with castles! There was intrigue, romance, dalliances, partner swapping, everything that was missing from the house party here, but oh so much better. What's more, there was an urgency to the whole situation. There was a force pushing the narrative that made me not want to put the book down. And as for that ending? I will warn you now, you have to have the next book, Recipe for Treason, ready to go. Because while their continental adventure might be over, there's still a fox in the hen house.
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