“Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark.” — Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
Elizabeth Bennet, CIA, receives a late-night call to Langley shortly after returning from a long, exhausting deep-cover mission.
She is offered a new deep-cover mission, an opportunity to team with CIA agent, Charles Bingley, and an MI-6 agent, Fitzwilliam Darcy. Darcy is MI-6 — and in the States trailing international terrorist, George Wickham.
When Darcy berates Elizabeth during their initial meeting, he irritates her enough to accept the mission: the seduction of Wickham.
Shadowy, taut, and urgent, but also, by turns, romantic, ironic and reflective. Can Elizabeth work with Darcy? Can she face what the mission requires of her? Can she discover her desired future, recover her unsorted past, and do it all in her fraught undercover present?
A spy novel, a romance, and a character study, Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense takes Austen into the dark and pits Elizabeth and Darcy against each other, against George Wickham, but also their professions, their pasts.
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