Customer Reviews

The Sentimental Soldier

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I think the first 80 pages started out well- male spy matching wits with female spy. But it didn't really seem like a romance towards the second half of the book because the hero and heroine seemed to have little interaction. You couldn't see how the romance developed because the mystery plot took precedence over the budding romance. Overall, it was still a good read, but it didn't live up to its promising beginning and interesting story line.

Here we have two stories, neither of which works. In the first half the hero and heroine meet on enemy territory and escape the French together, finally reaching Wellington's lines where the great general forces them to marry for propriety. Whereupon they fall in love. Unfortunately for Ms. Kihlstrom, this is only half as long as a book ought to be, so upon reaching London they are forced to undertake intelligence work which they keep secret from one another thus producing an estrangement. Unfortunately for the reader, this estrangement is neither convincing nor interesting. There ought to be sparks in a love story. Other problems spring from Ms. Kihlstrom's powerful grasp on European history: she has squeezed the Napoleonic era out of any recognizable shape. The plot turns on a beacon used to flash information across the channel to Wellington, who was in Spain. Perhaps Ms. Kihlstorm's editor could buy her a map of Europe. Then there was the spy who went to France in the early nineties (when Naponeon was a young officer) and stayed to serve England because she could see that he was about to become a dictator, conquer Europe and threaten England. The rest of the plot is just as probable.