http://jacescribbles.blogspot.com/200... ( )

This is the second book in the trilogy (series?) about the shadowy organization known as the Committee.

Genevieve is a lawyer who needs a vacation. And she's planned one--she's on her way to Costa Rica, but she just has to do this one thing for her law firm first: deliver some papers to billionaire Harry Van Dorn to sign.

Which is where she runs into trouble. Van Dorn is a notorious playboy, but Genevieve thinks she can handle him. He arranges it so she has to spend the night on his yacht, and seems to enjoy playing games with her. Unfortunately, the timing is disastrous.

Peter Jensen, currently posing as Van Dorn's personal assistant, is actually an assassin, and Van Dorn is actually a whacked-out lunatic with a 7-point plan to throw the world into chaos and profit by it. Peter's mission is to discover the plan and kill Van Dorn.

And to accomplish that mission, he may well have to eliminate Genevieve, who's definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Like Black Ice, it's an intense, exciting story, with a very dark hero who falls in love with a woman he's supposed to kill. Anne Stuart does a great job with this kind of hero, making his ruthless, practical mindset very believable.

Genevieve is also believable, though--oddly--not as sympathetic for me. I could easily believe in her character as a smart, successful lawyer who knows she can handle herself, doesn't quite believe when she finds herself in over her head, and especially that she makes up her own mind about who to believe--the smooth, charming billionaire, whose type she's handled before; or the bland personal assistant who's suddenly become hard and dangerous and who makes her distinctly uncomfortable?

It's a personal failing, I'm sure, that I related more easily to the character who does what needs to be done without regard to emotion, than to a strong and confident woman. To paraphrase Harry Dresden, that would probably tell me something important about myself, if I were an astute sort of person. Good thing I'm not astute.

I didn't connect with this story quite as well as I did with Black Ice, or with the next book, Ice Blue, though I still loved it. Maybe it's that the villain was so over-the-top James-Bond-ish, to the point where he wasn't really understandable. Or maybe it's just that I didn't connect as well with Genevieve. Still a great story, though. ( )

I usually like Anne Stuart's psychotic lovers, but this one didn't work for me, and if her lover doesn't grab you, then her whole book falls flat. So while she is usually reliable, this one, set on a boat, with a lawyer taken hostage when it was time to kill her evil client, was not sexually taut nor terribly interesting

http://inmybooks.com/blog1/2007/02/28... ( )