The Agency

"The Body at the Tower is part of a trilogy, and is the second in the series. The third one has not come out yet [it is due to be released in August 2011 in the UK]. It’s set in Victorian England. It’s a juicy romance novel for young people, but it’s just loaded with economics. It’s about a very poor young woman, who is actually half-Chinese, half-Caucasian, in a society that very much discriminates against people who are biracial. She is recruited into a school for female spies. She is sent on a mission and the person she falls in love with, they do a lot of bantering – it’s kind of a love-hate relationship. In this book there’s a murder, and it turns out the murder is all about profits, and the profits associated with payouts in the construction trade. So the crime is economically motivated – as is her job. She’s doing this work in order to survive; she has nothing else. As a reader who enjoys romance novels, it is kind of fun waiting for the third one to come out to see what happens… The three main ideas are the poverty, discrimination and profit. The whole crime revolves around profit. No, and the author notes that. She says this idea of a school for female spies is utterly make-believe because there was no such thing. Women at the time had no rights whatsoever."