At seventy-five-years-old, Ethel Fiona Crestwater is used to being underestimated. She looks like someone’s grandma, although she’s never married or had children; petite and a bit frail, she’s not a threat to anyone. Or is she…?

Ethel runs a boarding house for government agents, and when someone murders one of her boarders, she springs into action—much to the surprise of her distant cousin Jesse, who has recently come to stay with her while he attends university. As he watches her photograph the crime scene, conceal evidence, and speed-dial the Secret Service Director, Jesse realizes that there’s much more to Ethel than appearances suggest.

But when Jesse is assaulted and the gym bag full of cash Ethel had hidden is stolen from the basement, the pair decides it’s time to launch their own unofficial investigation. With no one to trust but each other, these double-first-cousins-twice-removed form an unlikely bond and learn that the only thing truly worth risking your life for is family.

IN A NUTSHELL
I don’t normally give 5 stars to light entertainment books like this, but this one did what it set out to do so perfectly that it deserves it.

This was so much fun that I read it in twenty-four hours even though I hadn’t planned on reading it at all.

It was clever, cleanly written, engaging, exciting and hopeful. Oh, and the lead character, was someone I’d like to meet (as long as she didn’t suspect me of doing something she disapproved of).

There seems to be a trend at the moment for genre books to have older people as the protagonist. They’re often retired, always resourceful and usually have things in their past that the casual observer wouldn’t guess at. It’s a format that I love when the author gets it right. Mark de Castrique aces it. ‘Secret LIves‘ is a textbook example of how to make the most of this subgenre.

Ethel Crestwater, the protagonist in ‘Secret Lives‘, is seventy-five years old. When we meet her, she appears to be a nice older lady who runs a boarding house for members of the various alphabet agencies who need accommodation in Washington, D.C. Ethel is, of course, more than she seems. A former FBI agent working under Hoover as one of the few women in the Bureau, she’s been part of the DC Federal Agency community for decades. She’s well connected, and she knows where the bodies are buried. She may even have buried a few herself.

I loved watching her move into action when one of her boarders is killed outside her house. The mystery was solid and topical, involving corruption, cryptocurrency and inter-agency rivalry. The action scenes were vivid and credible. I liked that while Ethel was presented as a fit, energetic, supremely competent seventy-five-year-old, she wasn’t presented as a superhero, and she didn’t try to do everything by herself. She has a young sidekick, a distant cousin who is boarding with her while studying computing. She also works her contacts in the local police force and the government agencies skillfully, gaining their cooperation by offering them an unofficial, deniable route for handling potentially embarrassing cross-jurisdictional issues.

The pace was fast. The prose was clean. The characters were credible. I liked that the humour was witty rather than slapstick and that the story wasn’t played for laughs. It worked as an espionage-adjacent thriller. It was exciting and fast-paced. There was a little bit too much violence and threat for it to be described as a cosy mystery, but the underlying tone was hopeful. I always believed that Ethel would sort it all out in the end – if she didn’t get herself killed in the process.

I wolfed ‘Secret Lives’ down in a day and immediately bought the next two books in the series ‘Dangerous Women‘ (2023) and ‘Desperate Spies’ (2025).