The Prince of Spies is the third novel in Elizabeth Camden’s Hope and Glory series. Luke Delacroix is the younger brother of Gray, who heads the family’s spice business. But Luke doesn’t have a head for business. His one attempt was a drastic failure that continues to haunt him.

Instead, Luke has become a journalist. He’s just returned from a fifteen-month stint in a Cuban jail. He was thought to be supporting insurrectionists there, but he was actually on an undercover assignment that outed a traitor in the US military.

Now he has set his sights on five Congressmen whom he would like to see removed from office by research and articles showing their downside.

Enemy number one is Congressman Clyde Magruder, the head of Magruder Foods, the rival to the Delacroix company. But it’s not just the business rivalry. The Magruders cut costs by using additives and chemicals in their products. There were no laws about food labeling in the early 1900s. Luke knows personally of people who have been harmed by contents from Magruder’s.

In addition, Clyde is known to have had at least two children from affairs.

One day, Luke spies a young woman trying to rescue a dog who had fallen through ice in a pond. He jumps in to help her, depute Gray’s admonitions not to. Luke and the young woman, whose name he learned is Marianne, successfully rescue the dog, and Gray whisks Luke away to get him into dry clothes. Luke tracks down the fact that Marianne works as a photographer for the government and eventually finds her. But he’s stunned to learn she is Clyde Magruder’s daughter.

They decide not to see each other, but they keep crossing paths–sometimes on purpose.

Luke learns of an opportunity to join a group of volunteers for experiments testing the effects of additives in food. He applies and is accepted, planning to use the information in his articles. The volunteers nickname themselves the Poison Squad. The author says in her end notes that there really was such a group. The experiments eventually led to laws to protect food products.

There were several layers to this novel: Luke’s finding his place after not feeling he fit in for so long, the Romeo and Juliet-type romance, the food safety issues. Also, Marianne struggles with wanting a “normal” family. She loves her family, but their constant bickering and her father’s indiscretions are hard to deal with. Then, as she joins Luke in his research, she finds her family’s business has not always operated candidly. Trying to find the right perspective and balance with them is difficult. And Luke has to learn that, in the course of righting wrongs, it’s all too easy to forget that innocent people who could be hurt by his actions.

I enjoyed this book, and the series, a lot. I’ve missed visiting with the characters since I finished.