Ava Morgan, $2.99, ISBN 978-1310970450
Fantasy Romance, 2014

Ava Morgan’s The Industrial Spy is the third entry in her Curiosity Chronicles, which revolves around agents of the Cabinet of Intellectual Curiosities (COIC). This is a steampunk story, set in an alternate version of the early 1800s that has magic and science coexisting side by side. Ooh, isn’t it all so exciting.

Honestly, the last two stories had been on the blah side, so I actually forgot the existence of this one in my pile of unread stuff until I get around to review the show Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. That’s when I find myself thinking, “Curiosity… what, wasn’t there a third book in some series that I’m supposed to have reviewed oh, seven years ago?”

What can I say? Better late than never, eh?

In this one, we head over to the northern regions of France in 1838. Apparently things are pretty dire and corrupt over there, as our heroine Dominique Fontaine can attest: her family had their business shut down by the big bad Emile Broussard.

Now an agent of Bureau de l’Industrie, she gets herself hired as a worker in one of his illegal flour mills, which the man plans to double as a brothel, and looking for evidence to nail him. Sure, everything and everywhere is corrupt, but let’s still have our faith in the justice system!

Our hero is Colton Smythe. He is ordered by the COIC to team up with take in Dominique to obtain whatever information she has on Broussard, as well as to shut down the man’s operations. I’m not sure why the two agencies cannot cooperate—the author says it’s because one is French and one is British, and I guess the red tape to get the two agencies to cooperate must be horrible indeed—but Colton creates a distraction to haul Dominique in for questioning.

Let’s just say that she is not amused that he has ruined six months worth of her undercover stint.

From the first few pages I already have a number of issues with this story.

One, the hero just shows up and he quickly manages to get into and search Broussard’s office, something that Dominique apparently spent six months trying to even figure out how to even start.

Two, the heroine has a personal emotional investment in this mission. Won’t that make her more of a liability where this mission is concerned? Indeed, Dominique quickly reveals that she is the emotional type that makes decisions more on feels than reals. Needless to say, her feels aren’t very helpful.

Three, because the two agencies somehow don’t talk, Dominique doesn’t anticipate Colton’s arrival, and he doesn’t bother to get her aside her to say, “Hey, shall we work together?” Given that the heroine is the impulsive, headstrong, and always-wrong type, she starts going all hai-ya me-kung-fu-master wooo only to fall flat on her back and get humiliated by the hero.

Four, our heroine has to admit after her humiliating defeat that her entire plan will never work anyway because her plan hinges on her doing a Mortal Kombat on Broussard, who is twice the size of Colton, and she can’t even take down Colton. Wait, she only figures this out after six months? Did she even have any plan that she officially worked out with her employers, or does the agency employ only village idiots and then let them run out and do whatever?

Five… well:

Dominique, out of knives, aether sedatives, and escape plans for the moment, walked alongside him on the dirt path. She had an hour to think of a way to get out of her restraints and alert her agency of a COIC agent’s presence in the area.

Is it the author’s intention all along to make everyone on the good guy side to appear incompetent and idiotic?

Eventually, their respective employers order them to work together. Why? Are they hoping that these two idiots will accidentally trip over something and cause the factory to explode?

It’s a good thing that the rest of the story follows the same vein of idiocy, because it can never recover from such an awful first impression it leaves on me.

Yes, the rest of the story is practically a cliché of an ineptly cobbled-together romantic suspense: bickering at the worst moments, plot turns and twists that often feel too convenient for the sake of plot, forced sexual tension, and secret agents behaving more like squabbling kids left by their parents to play in a ball pit because those parents want a few minutes of a silence and sanity.

The one good thing about this one is that the author’s writing style is clean and very readable, but still, the main characters are too ridiculous to be taken seriously as secret agents, and the suspense plot isn’t any better. The author has done some serious industrial-sized self-sabotage on her story here.