And having cut my teeth reading historical fiction such as Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche and Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, I resolved to give Bourne's fiction a try immediately, and I'm so glad I did. When I stumbled across The Forbidden Rose on a friend's 'to-read' Goodreads shelf, I was immediately intrigued as I've always found the French Revolution to be a fascinating time period. When a threat against Marguerite blinds William to the danger at his doorstep, the spymaster finds himself facing the guillotine, and as the erstwhile head of La Fleche Marguerite faces her greatest challenge yet - rescuing the spy who has managed to capture her heart. But much like himself, his enemy's daughter is more than she would seem, a woman of fire and intelligence who has him questioning his future with the Service.

Under the guise of Guillaume LeBreton, an scarred and unassuming merchant, William and his knife-wielding compatriot, a street-smart boy known as Hawker, agree to guide Marguerite to Paris. With the Service bleeding its best and brightest, the lists must be destroyed, and there is no one better to lead William to the mad listmaker than his daughter Marguerite.

William Doyle, one of the British Service's top agents, was sent to the de Fleurignac chateau to find Marguerite's father, the man believed responsible for providing lists of British agents to the French government, who are then assassinated. But the merchant is more than he seems, and Marguerite never expected his unwanted presence to blossom into an attraction that threatens everything she holds dear. When a bookseller stumbles upon her gutted hiding place, Marguerite is sure she cannot trust him - but equally determined to use him to guide her to Paris and her father.

La Fleche has been betrayed, and so Marguerite desperately goes to ground, hoping to see her network of spies and contacts safely dissolved - but escaping the clutches of the radical Jacobins determined to make an example of her organization, and leaving behind the life-saving work that has consumed her life since the onset of the Revolution is more difficult than she'd ever dreamed. But Marguerite has more to fear than wrath against once-powerful French aristocrats - as the head of La Fleche, an organization responsible for ferreting those 'sparrows' out of the country that find themselves condemned by the Committee of Public Safety, she stands to be branded a traitor to the Republic. Marguerite de Fleurignac, who once graced the halls of Versailles, has been left to forage in the French countryside following an attack on her family's chateau that saw her ancestral home turned to ash.

The Forbidden Rose by Joanna Bourne