Still Mr. And Mrs. is a typical romance novel, involving an estranged couple who seem to have insurmountable differences between them yet enough love that the reader is assured that they will eventually find their way back to each other in the end. If you’re a romance reader, you’ll probably enjoy the characters and the circumstances. If you’re not a romance reader, the clichés and the sappiness might be a bit much to handle.

The main characters are Bobby and Angela Holland, Secret Service agents who have been separated for almost a year. Angela, unable to deal with Bobby’s inability to express emotion, has just been proposed to be her movie star boyfriend when she gets the call that she’s been assigned to protect the President of the United States’ mother, Daisy Riordan. Excited to have an undercover assignment, Angela arrives in rural Illinois only to find that her husband has been assigned to the president’s mother as well. The two must pretend to be husband-and-wife housekeepers and watch out for anyone threatening Crazy Daisy’s life — but how are they supposed to pull it off when they can barely stand to be in a room together?

The characters are decent in Still Mr. and Mrs., though they do get a bit sappy and often do things that make no sense. However, McBride does a good job of giving them enough background and personality to get the reader to care about them. She also does a good job of incorporating the Secret Service and a mystery into the plot. If she were to have concentrated on those aspects a bit more, the book would probably have been more interesting and real, but it might also have alienated her target audience — romance readers. As it is, romance readers will be pleased and others who read the book will still find it interesting. Although the book does regress into sappy clichés a few times, and it feels that the characters are simply keeping themselves apart so the book doesn’t end too soon, McBride’s novel is still a quick and enjoyable read to while away an afternoon.