The Impostor by Celeste Bradley

[meganbmoore]

Dalton Montmorency is the current leader of the Liar’s Club, the group of spies from The Pretender and The Spy. A popular political cartoonist, Sir Thorogood, has recently published cartoons that make certain parts of the government nervous and annoy the privileged, and so he’s ordered to impersonate Sir Thorogood in hopes it will make the real one reveal himself. Sir Thorogood is actually Clara Simpson, a widow who lives with her husband’s sister and her family. Annoyed by the fake Sir Thorogood, she pretends to be a gaudy ninny so that she can annoy him with her fawning. In addition to Sir Thorogood, Clara also trades places with her neighbor’s mistreated maid, Rose, with said neighbor being the chief target of her cartoons. Having noticed Sir Thorogood’s favorite target, Dalton breaks into the neighbor’s house and presents himself as “Monty” to “Rose” who discovers him.

The comedy is great, but most of the book is Clara and Dalton sparring in one guise of the other, and they almost never interact without both pretending to be something they aren’t, and even apart, they spend most of the book thinking “in character.” At the end of the book, I’m not sure I really know what their “real” personalities are like, much less that they do. Bradley also spends so much time on the deceptions and keeping up with them that she never really solidly pins down motivations or plot. Still, it was highly entertaining.