Love: Undercover

Love: Undercover is a 2004 romance novel by Nancy Wagner, writing under the name Hailey North, and the second book in her “Finding Love in Doolittle, Arkansas” series. Wagner, a Mississippi native, worked as a game show lawyer in California before taking up writing and later moving to Louisiana.

Jenifer Janey Wright, a single mother of two college-age children, is the director of the library in the town of Doolittle. One evening, Eric Hamilton, a federal undercover agent, arrives. Claiming to be scouting out the town for possible investment opportunities, he stops by the library “to follow up on surveillance photos taken of her with two known low-level functionaries,” named Lars and Franco, “of an international criminal ring” that specializes in counterfeiting. He flirts with Jenifer, who is eager for a fling now that her two children are away at college, and she invites him to a family cookout that evening. While Eric and Jenifer are conversing on her front porch, Jenifer’s friend Pamela calls, having knocked her husband, Ace, unconscious with a flowerpot after he began abusing her, and Eric begins to think that Ace is tied up with the criminal gang. (Jenifer had earlier discovered that a twenty-dollar bill passed to her by a girl named Andie to cover library fines was likely fake.)

On Sunday morning, instead of going to church, Jenifer takes Eric to her favorite scenic spot, where they talk and kiss. However, he does not call or visit during the next few days, as he is occupied with staking out a site in El Dorado (Union County), where he sees Ace take a set of duffle bags up to a hotel room rented by Lars.

When he returns, Jenifer recruits him to fill in a spot on her bowling team. During the game, Ace strikes Pamela. While comforting Pamela, Jenifer mentions the potentially fake bill from Andie, which leads Pamela to confess her suspicions that Ace is engaged in criminal activity.

Jenifer goes the next day to the mobile home park where Andie lives, followed discreetly by Eric. Andie tells Jenifer that she had taken the twenty-dollar bill from her father, who works at the local paper mill, where Ace also works as a truck driver. After Jenifer leaves, Eric talks to Andie and her father. He learns that the paper mill is the center for the production of counterfeit money and that Andie’s father had found some and taken it.

Eric attends church on Sunday, and afterward, they go to his hotel room, where Jenifer confesses that she only wants sex, no romance. Eric is happy to oblige, but they are interrupted by Mrs. Ball, the local real estate agent, offering to show him a local property. After Sunday lunch with her family, Eric follows Jenifer, who drives to the Tri-Forest Paper Mill, apparently intent upon conducting some amateur sleuthing, but is turned away by the mill’s security. After several attempts thwarted by interruptions, Eric and Jenifer finally have sex, realizing during the process that they want more from each other than they had previously imagined. The day before a planned raid at the paper mill, he stays the night with her, and in the morning, he laments that soon Doolittle would be just another job and then he would go to Washington to finish the details of the case and be on to the next assignment.

That afternoon, Jenifer goes to visit Andie, who lets slip that Eric is with law enforcement. Jenifer goes back out to the paper mill but is taken captive by the manager. When Eric shows up as a buyer of the counterfeit money, authorities raid the mill. Three weeks later, he returns to town and proposes to Jenifer, with plans to move to Doolittle. In the third book in the series, Not the Marrying Kind, Eric is found serving as the town’s chief of police.

For additional information:
Hailey North. https://haileynorth.com/ (accessed July 16, 2025).

North, Hailey. Love: Undercover. New York: Avon Books, 2004.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas