The Traitor and the Tunnel | Y S Lee

The Traitor and the Tunnel is the third book in the Mary Quinn series – a Victorian detective series for teens.

It is now 1860 and Mary is 17 and a full member of the Women’s Detective Agency. Her first assignment takes her to Buckingham Palace where she takes on the role of domestic servant to Queen Victoria’s family to uncover the thief making off with the royal trinkets.

Naturally there are complications. The young Prince of Wales is implicated in a murder in an opium den, James Easton reappears in the tunnels beneath the Palace and suddenly Mary’s first assignment had become more dangerous and more personal than she would like.

Lee has written an easy to read, engaging historical mystery.

Younger readers (11+) could enjoy this series too, but there are some gentle romantic entanglements at the end of this particular book that keep it in the teen section rather than junior fiction!

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_{Get steeped in suspense, romance, and high Victorian intrigue as Mary goes undercover at Buckingham Palace — and learns a startling secret at the Tower of London.}

_{Queen Victoria has a little problem: there’s a petty thief at work in Buckingham Palace. Charged with discretion, the Agency puts quickwitted Mary Quinn on the case, where she must pose as a domestic while fending off the attentions of a feckless Prince of Wales. But when the prince witnesses the murder of one of his friends in an opium den, the potential for scandal looms large. And Mary faces an even more unsettling possibility: the accused killer, a Chinese sailor imprisoned in the Tower of London, shares a name with her long-lost father.}

_{Meanwhile, engineer James Easton, Mary’s onetime paramour, is at work shoring up the sewers beneath the palace, where an unexpected tunnel seems to be very much in use. Can Mary and James trust each other (and put their simmering feelings aside) long enough to solve the mystery and protect the Royal Family? Hoist on your waders for Mary’s most personal case yet, where the stakes couldn’t be higher — and she has everything to lose.}