The Banana Girls are back in a new adventure. This time, it’s Anna who is front and center when she gets an assignment to guard a prince of the Luxembourg royal family. Her real assignment though is to investigate recent attacks on the prince and find out who’s responsible. She only has two weeks to solve the case.

Easy enough, Anna thinks, until she meets Prince Léopold. He’s handsome. He’s sexy. He’s charming. And he’s falling for Anna! Anna is falling for Leo, too, despite the Banana Girls’ Rule Number One: never get romantically involved with a guy on a mission. In true Banana Girl fashion, Anna does her best to complete the job despite potential romantic entanglements and the jealousy of some of Leo’s other female bodyguards.

Spies Never Swoon can be a bit over the top sometimes. The girls are modern-day Charlie’s Angels, (except “Charlie” is a woman named Stacia). But that doesn’t keep the book from being good fun. If the idea of college coeds doubling as super-spies seems a bit far-fetched, it’s something easy to overlook. There is plenty of action, adventure, danger, and yes, romance, as Anna gathers clues and tries to sort out their meaning. The story is entertaining from the first page to the last and spiced with a few surprises thrown in her and there.

My only disappointment is that with Anna the focus of the story, the other four Banana Girls only appear in cameos. Anna carries the plot ably by herself, but having read the first book in the series, I missed seeing the rest of the team members in larger roles. This is hardly a fatal flaw, however.

Each of the Banana Girls emerges as a well-developed character. They have distinct personalities, styles, and senses of humor. Anna, at the center of the story, is painted in great detail. But even the four girls holding the down Club Banana back in Atlanta while Anna is with Prince Leo in Miami are multidimensional. All five feel like real people the reader can care about and root for, even if they do have abilities and gadgets most of us can only dream about. Prince Leo, too, is well-fleshed out, but I can’t say the same about some of the other supporting cast. It would be nice if the same care that went into creating the Banana Girls had been applied to them as well.

At the end of the day, all the issues I had with the book were minor, and I loved it. Readers who like action, mystery, and strong female characters should love it too.