Kittenpie Reads KidLit

by Eleanor Updale

#3 in the Series

Montmorency's back many years later, with a whole host of characters from the first books, not to mention a few from the new generation who are just growing into their own and able to join him and Lord George on their wild and dangerous spying missions.

Here, Montmorency, Vi and her son, George, and George's nephews all get in on the mission, which takes them all the way to Paterson, New Jersey in search of anarchists. Again, there is costume and undercover work involved, though this time, it's not Montmorency who dives into the lower classes and the plots of would-be terrorists. Instead, while a junior Fox-Selwyn joins the inner circle of anarchists, Dr. Farcett visits with Thomas Edison, and Montmorency falls for a woman so hard that it threatens the success of the mission when he is reluctant to leave on the ship that carries George's nephew Frank and a young man planning a bombing.

Quick thinking and new schemes hatched on a moment's notice save the day, and by the end of the book, they have, they think, found a way to extricate Frank from the anarchists without seeming to have betrayed them. Everything seems fine... until a package arrives and sets up book #4.

Again, the books seemed rather scattered over a few different plotlines, though it was more cohesive than the last. In the end, though, the action is fast-paced, the suspense kept taut, and the characters make you care about them, and those are the things that make or break a novel of this sort. So while I didn't love it as much as the first book either, I wasn't putting it down! Rather, I quickly picked up the next installment.