Well, I finished this book and actually the ending redeemed it a bit for me. I would rate it higher than Ice Blue, although it was not nearly as good a book as Black Ice, IMO.

I rate Ice Blue a bit higher than Ice Storm because it seemed more consistent to me in the sense that Taka was what I would expect a Committee agent to be, and Isobel was more competent in that book as well.

I agree with you that Black Ice was the best of the series (I will be doing a dueling review of it with Sherry Thomas soon). But I think one of the elements that made Black Ice so great was the ruthless competence of the Committee and its agents, Bastien included. And it seems to me that that element is fading more and more with each successive book.

I found Isabel’s character to be somewhat disappointing. She was pretty weepy for an “Ice Queen” and never seemed to me to be the icily efficient female counterpart of Bastien or Peter. She did not seem to be that clever or resourceful an agent or administrator, and missed several really obvious, important intelligence issues about the motivations of the people she was working with and (supposedly) protecting, a fact that resulted in the deaths of many people who were working for her.

That’s really my biggest issue with this book.

It would have been nice to see her get the upper hand on Killian a bit more, but he kept taking her weapons from her like candy from a baby and doing exactly what he wanted.

I think that that was the problem with the book — Stuart wanted Killian to have the upper hand and for that reason, she had to make Isobel less strong than she’d been in previous books. While that may have made for some emtionally intense relationship dynamics, it also compromised the consistency of the series.

I was initially rolling my eyes at the reappearances of Bastien, Chloe, Peter and Genevieve (they keep turning up like bad pennies or Bedwyns), but in the final analysis, I love pretty much any scene with Bastien in it.

LOL re. “bad pennies or Bedwyns.” But I eat up the Bastien scenes. I love the line in Jayne’s review where she says “Bastien proves that he’s still my favorite of this whole series as he’s really the only one with his eye on the ball.” I adore Bastien, and this is a big part of why.

I found Isabel’s character to be somewhat disappointing. She was pretty weepy for an “Ice Queen” and never seemed to me to be the icily efficient female counterpart of Bastien or Peter. She did not seem to be that clever or resourceful an agent or administrator, and missed several really obvious, important intelligence issues about the motivations of the people she was working with and (supposedly) protecting, a fact that resulted in the deaths of many people who were working for her. It would have been nice to see her get the upper hand on Killian a bit more, but he kept taking her weapons from her like candy from a baby and doing exactly what he wanted.

I was initially rolling my eyes at the reappearances of Bastien, Chloe, Peter and Genevieve (they keep turning up like bad pennies or Bedwyns), but in the final analysis, I love pretty much any scene with Bastien in it.

Selene

The comments feed for any particular post is this the link and then “?feed=comments-rss2″

Here is the link:

Tell me, is there a way to get a RSS feed for the comments of a specific post around here? It would make it ever so much more convenient to just follow things through the usual reader.

Selene

I also had a problem that I think Jayne didn’t have (correct me if I’m wrong, Jayne) — I thought that Killian’s character was underdeveloped and sketchy, and I felt I didn’t have a good sense of who he was even at the end of the book.

Despite that though, I ended up giving the book a higher grade than Jayne did, and that was because I so enjoyed the dialogue, Stuart’s lean writing style, the side characters, and the way she kept me entertained and turning the pages. As I said to Jayne in an email, there are a lot of books that lose me around the 20 page point, so any book that keeps me reading quickly and easily gets a lot of points.

I still enjoyed the book though, so I completely understand why you are looking forward to it. Stuart does so many things well.

It turns out to be a disguise.

Kinda figured that ’cause it’s romance, after all. And the weaker heroine is also expected ’cause it’s Anne Stuart. I’ve yet to recall a really strong heroine from Stuart…except for maybe in A Rose at Midnight.

Still very much looking forward to this book, though.

You guys used to have a edit function, why’d you get rid of it?

SPOILER
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It turns out to be a disguise.