Dear Author » Morocco

REVIEW: In Bed with a Stranger by India Grey

Jane — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:00:46 +0000

Dear Ms. Grey:

This is a sequel to the Craving the Forbidden (review here) and I thought it was interesting to take an established relationship, shake it up, and still convince the readers at the end that these two could be happy beyond the pages of the book. Sophie Greenham fell in love with Kit Fitzroy after pretending to be his brother’s fiancée. Kit leaves for Aghanistan and when he returns, he is not the same person. There is a bridge between the two that Sophie is unsure of how to cross. The bridge began to build over Kit’s deployment, with his email responses and his phone conversations becoming terser, shorter.

Kit is suffering from a case of PTSD. It’s unclear how severe it is. He is jumpy at loud noises. He is experiencing night terrors. He is feeling tremendous guilt over the injury to one of the young soldiers in his unit. Sophie acted quite young in this book and I was disappointed by her. While Kit was gone for five months, it didn’t seem like Sophie did much to prepare herself for his return. Her lack of understanding of what Kit might be going through seemed a tad self centered and a bit juvenile.

Both Kit and Sophie mask their relationship problems by enjoying each other physically, but Kit wonders that the shortness of their relationship (only three weeks before his five month deployment) could possibly withstand his mental and emotional difficulties. They were, as Kit acknowledge, virtual strangers. Sophie preferred to believe that their physical closeness could not exist without emotional closeness.

The story transitions from Kit’s return to a trip to Morocco to meet with Kit’s estranged mother and to discover the secrets of his past. Much of the book takes place in Morocco and the simple relationship problem is compounded by standard HP tropes which is where I felt the book faltered. Sophie grew up with a hippy mother who refused to acknowledge ordinary structural bonds like the “mother/daughter”. Her unconventional upbringing made her yearn for a stable home and a love like the one she believes she might have with Kit. However, Kit’s wealth and titled family make her feel like that awkward commune girl trying to fit in with the cheerleaders at high school. Sophie overcompensates, driven by her feelings of inferiority. She never wants to show weakness in their relationship which, in turn, leads Kit to believe that she cannot handle the darkness of his emotions. This emotional tug of war is great and the use of the sexual tension pushing against the emotional tension was moving.

I was less enthused by the mystery of Kit’s parentage. I felt that was an unnecessary complication and conflict and led to too easy of a resolution. Kit hadn’t seen his mother since he was six yet the feelings of abandonment and betrayal were quickly resolved. Combined with all the other emotional struggles Kit had to deal with, this seemed improbable. Further, I didn’t like the quick way in which Sophie became attached to Kit’s mother. In some ways, perhaps it was reasonable because Kit’s mother was like what Sophie wanted her own mother to be, but Sophie’s first priority should have been Kit’s emotional well being, just as making Sophie happy was Kit’s first thought. This desire to push reconciliation on Kit was frustrating and seemed, again, a bit selfish.

This is not to say that Sophie was unlikeable but that this portion of the book was my least favorite. I liked the idea of exploring their relationship at greater length, but I didn’t enjoy the mother complications, particularly because of how it was resolved. I will say that this story is very sexy and I appreciate the open door nature of the book, particularly having come off a stint of reading a few Harlequin SuperRomances where the sexual tension was about as spare as the fat on Heidi Klum’s thighs. C+

Best regards

Jane

REVIEW: The Tenth Gift by Jane Johnson

Jayne — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:00:18 +0000

Dear Ms Johnson,

Since I love historical fiction, I checked out “The Tenth Gift” when I saw it listed at Fictionwise. The blurb intrigued me but not enough to immediately buy it. But I kept going back and looking at it. Something about it wouldn’t let me go and when Fictionwise offered a sale, I took the plunge. It was a little slow going at first. Then suddenly it took off and I couldn’t stop reading it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And when I had finished it, I was so glad I’d taken the chance.

I used to do some simple embroidery myself though nothing on the scale of Catherine Anne Tregenna’s work. Cat sounds like a true artist; someone with a rare gift and talent few are blessed with. I had no idea that in the seventeenth century, women – who would have actually done the work – were not considered able to join an embroidery guild nor would they have drawn most of the patterns they used. Typical men – foist the work on the women then take the credit.

I can well understand her frustration with that aspect of her life and also her dread of being forced into a marriage she didn’t want – no matter that her cousin seems like a decent man. As she puts it – married, living in a small house, pregnant year after year, slowly going mad in Cornwall – I’d dream and scheme to get the hell out of Dodge myself. And for a young woman who’d never seen anything of the world, the idea of actually seeing Barbary pirates would seem grand. Until, as Cat finds out, you need to be careful what you wish for.

Just as Cat has her faults, modern Julia isn’t a squeaky clean angel either. In fact, I rather didn’t care for her at first. Having a long standing affair with her best friend’s husband is awful. No matter that the man himself is a heel. Then she wasn’t the mistress of tact in helping her cousin deal with her husband’s death by suicide. But as she began to dig into the mystery of Cat’s past via the embroidery book in which Cat had painstakingly written her true thoughts of life as a servant in Cornwall, to be followed by Cat’s initial account of being seized, along with 59 other people from a Cornish church by pirates, I was snagged for good.

I love how you let the story of what happened to Cat be slowly revealed – both through her writing, what scarce items remain of her and in glimpses of the past. Thank you for the manner in which you convey information to the reader by having Julia look it up herself on Google rather than awkwardly cramming it down our throats in huge gulps. And oh, the descriptions of Cornwall and Morocco. I was there seeing the Cornish light by the sea. The scents, sounds and sights of the souqs of Rabat engulfed me. I was gripping my ereader as Julia and I survived her wild stretch limo taxi ride from Casablanca to Rabat – complete with gestures, curses and suddenly swerving across three lanes of traffic. Definitely take your valium before trying that!

By the end of the book, I had come to appreciate how none of the characters are blameless. Each has done something which shames them and most acknowledge their failings. I got the feeling that redemption had been sought and given. That love had cleansed and cleaned. And about that love. Sometimes an author has a hard time getting me to believe in one love story, much less two. When one love story begins in a pirate kidnapping, proceeds through a hellish slave journey by sea, then wanders through the heroine being sold at auction, my belief is sorely tested. I don’t like uneven power divisions between my heroes and heroines. But to be honest, I felt Cat was calling the shots long before she decides to finally end her lover’s torment and agree to marry him. Poor bastard.

Another thank you for giving Julia and her love time to get to know each other, to court each other before handing us a line about any rushed wedding and HEA. Those two have a lot to work out and deal with even in the face of “twue love.” It’s also sad to see how little some things have changed over the centuries – war and religion will always bedevil us it seems.

Why didn’t I give you an A? The woo – woo stuff – both with the old ladies and their predictions, the echoing of the farewell letters, and at the end with settling Rob’s ghost, brings the grade down slightly. But it was eerie how you tied it all together and had it make sense.

Thanks for a fascinating trip through two different worlds and an introduction to some memorable characters. I’d like one taste of Moroccan mint tea. Though only one sip as I’ve got about 10 pounds to go in my diet! A-

~Jayne

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

REVIEW: Ice Storm by Anne Stuart

Janine — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:43:05 +0000

Dear Ms. Stuart,

The latest book in your Ice series, Ice Storm, opens with a bang. Literally. In a prologue set sometime in the past, we are introduced to nineteen-year-old the heroine this way:

Mary Isobel Curwen had never shot a man before. She stood there, numb, unmoving. She’d never fired a gun before, and the feel of it in her grasp was disturbing.

A paragraph down is there is some more terrific writing:

Had she blown a hole through his head? His chest? Was he dead or just wounded? She knew she ought to check… She’d had every reason to shoot him but you couldn’t very well let a man bleed to death, could you? she thought dazedly. Even if he’d been trying to kill you?

Or maybe you could. Maybe you could drop the gun, turn and run, as fast as possible, before he suddenly stood up and came after you, before one of his buddies came running to see where the noise had come from. Maybe you could take the gun with you, just in case.

I love the creative use of second person here, the way you put me in Mary Isobel’s head. So I was very excited to sink into this book and find out more about what made Mary Isobel, or the mysterious Madam Isobel Lambert of your Ice series, tick.

As chapter one opens, the mysterious board that oversees the secret operation known as the Committee gives Isobel, who now heads the agency, the task of extracting a former terrorist who has also served as second-in-command to ruthless dictators out of Morocco. Serafin the Butcher, as he is known, is ready to trade all the intelligence he holds in his memory in return for safe passage to England.

Though she appears to be “of a certain age” Isobel is in fact only thirty-seven or so. She is more vulnerable than most people imagine, and it is her task to get Serafin out of Morocco and to debrief him. Just before she leaves, she gets a photo of Serafin and is shocked to recognize Killian, the man she shot and left for dead all those years ago, the man she had believed she killed.

Alternating with the present day chapters are flashbacks to Isobel and Killian’s past, which reveal that Isobel was once a normal American girl, planning to enroll in the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and to hike around France before that. In Marseilles she wandered into a bad neighborhood and was attacked by a gang, but a mysterious young man saved her.

The man was Killian. Though Mary Isobel didn’t know it, Killian was in France to join a group of terrorists planning to assassinate the leader of an African country. To provide himself with a cover, he invited Mary Isobel to hike with him, planning to seduce her to keep her blind to his plans, and then leave her when he reached his destination. Of course, the plan went awry, Killian wound up shot and left for dead, and the experience was the catalyst that led Mary Isobel to change her name and join the Committee.

On arriving at their meeting place in Morocco eighteen years later, Isobel is greeted by a twelve year old boy soldier with an AK-47. The boy, Mahmoud, leads her to the man who is now known as Serafin the Butcher. But he is so changed that Isobel is not certain if he and Killian are one and the same. Gone is the good looking young man who seduced her so expertly, and in his place is a paunchy, black-toothed, washed out but ruthless man. Soon, he and Isobel are on the go and in danger. And Isobel discovers that the attraction between Killian and herself did not die, anymore than he did.

Interspersed between Killian and Isobel’s story are subplots about other characters from previous Ice books. Harry Thomason, the previous head of the Committee, thinks the organization has gone to pot under Isobel’s leadership; Peter and Genevieve are dealing with infertility. Taka sends his cousin Reno to England for training to become a Committee recruit, and eventually, much to my delight, Bastien and Chloe from Black Ice appear in the book as well.

Ice Storm is action-filled, entertaining, and moves along at a good clip. As in some of your other books, the dialogue is often ironic or confrontational, and frequently terrific. Here’s an example, from one of the flashback scenes, when Killian is just getting to know Isobel, and she is still clueless about his identity.

“I’ve got a thermos of coffee,” he’d said by way of greeting. “Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.”

She just looked at him. “I don’t like sugar.”

He shrugged. “Well, if we’re going to be traveling together we’ll have to compromise. There isn’t really that much sugar in it.”

“I thought you said ‘sweet as love.’”

“I find love bittersweet, don’t you?”

She opened the thermos and poured some into the cap, taking a tentative sip. “I’m not sure I find love at all,” she replied.

While I enjoyed this and other aspects of the book, I also had some problems with it. To begin with, I was disappointed with the portrayal of Isobel. I had hoped for a heroine as ruthless and competent as the male agents in the Committee.

Isobel is likeable enough, and I don’t mind your showing her past as a vulnerable teenager who fell in love with the wrong man. I also had no objection to your portraying Isobel as a woman who has become weary of her job, or to the way meeting Killian again brought back some of her youthful vulnerability, as it was bound to do.

What bothered me was the way the book glossed over some of the most interesting pieces of Isobel’s past, her induction to the Committee and her work in the field. Not only that, there was little evidence of her training in the Isobel of the present, so that I became conscious of a double standard in your portrayal of Isobel when compared to that of the Committee’s male agents.

Bastien in Black Ice was bone-tired as well, but that didn’t stop him from being a killing machine for much of that book. Isobel, though she could take a life, was always left shaken afterwards.

Peter of Cold as Ice was willing to sleep with men to get the job done. And Taka, Bastien and Peter all understood that sex can equal power when used expertly enough. Not so Isobel.

In addition, there are so many hints that not everything about Killian is as it seems at first, and hints about other things as well, that I wondered how it was possible that I could easily pick up on them, while Isobel, who had supposedly spent years as an ice cold undercover operative, never had a clue.

No amount of emotional vulnerability or fraying would have made Bastien, Peter or Taka so blind, so I was left conclude that Isobel had never shared their cold competence, and to wonder how on earth she had ever been accepted into the Committee in the days when Harry Thomason ran it.

Much of the story is told from Isobel’s POV, with briefer sections in Killian’s. I can understand why you made that choice, because the story requires that Killian be shrouded in mystery. But the end result is that while I liked Killian, I was not convinced that he was “the most dangerous man in the world.” I never really felt I got much insight into his character, even at the end of the book, and he remains somewhat sketchy to me.

I was also, once again, and more than ever before, disappointed in the portrayal of the Committee. Gone is the ruthless, amoral, brutal and relentless organization that made Black Ice such a riveting book. When, in one scene Harry Thomason waxes nostalgic about “the good old days, where enemies were straightforward, where you trusted no one, and any inconveniences and anomalies were wiped out,” I found myself nodding in agreement.

I wondered if Thomason was right about the effects of Isobel’s leadership, since the Committee under her had evidently dwindled to a few people, most of whom had forgotten how to do their jobs. Their sudden incompetence felt like a contrivance to allow Killian to have the upper hand over Isobel for much of the book.

Still, the book was thoroughly involving, the sex scenes hot enough to make me fan myself, and I very much enjoyed the dialogue, the international settings, the lean and taut writing, the subplots about Peter and Reno, and the revelations about Mahmoud. Bastien’s appearance in the story made my heart skip a beat, and the final scene of the book was truly superb, just perfect.

For all these reasons I think that despite the problems I had, I would probably buy the book again, given the chance.

Ice Storm was deeply entertaining, but it could have been so much more. Black Ice was an A read for me, Cold as Ice a B+ , Ice Blue a B, and so, it’s with a mixture of gratitude for the enjoyment I’ve gotten from those books, sadness and the over this series’ diminishing returns for me, and the hope for more from Fire and Ice that I give Ice Storm a B-.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in mass market or ebook format.