Ice Series by Anne Stuart

I recently found the excuse to get back into Anne Stuart's Ice Series after reading the first book a few years ago and have found that the books that have followed are a bit of a mix bag for me.

Cold as Ice (A): Genevieve Spenser is getting ready to spend the next few weeks in Costa Rica on a humanitarian expedition but her boss asks her to get a few signatures on some legal documents from their client Harry Van Dorn. Harry, though, is not your regular client, he is a bit of a psycho with a plan for seven worldwide acts of destruction that will yield him a decent profit.

Peter Jensen is an undercover operative of the 'committee' and is in place as Van Horn's personal assistant. He is waiting for just the right moment to end Harry's plans for good but when the prim lawyer comes on board the yacht his plans are shot to hell. The stuck up Genevieve cannot seem to get the hint he keeps sending her to get off the darn boat so Peter is resigned to kill her as collateral damage, but the woman just gets under his skin and even his years as a ruthless assassin cannot bring him to kill the woman that has broken through his ice laden soul.

Although the romance was rushed in this one, the heroine's personality was quirky enough to make it believable. Genny pretended to be a stuck up b*tch because it was the only way to move ahead as a lawyer but she loved coming home and letting her hair down while Jensen was constantly pretend as well, to the point that he almost lost himself completely.

I also like the action on this one, with yacht's blowing up and deserted islands and finally a race through California. I would have said this one was more an action book vs a true romance, but it worked for me.

Ice Blue (C- ): We met Taka O'Brian in Cold as Ice as the operative the can be many faces and that rescues Genny from Van Horn at great personal expense. It's Taka's turn to work on a project close to his heart when he has to recover an antique Japanese urn that a religious cult leader has deemed necessary in a plot to destroy the world.

Summer Hawthorne is a museum curator and owner of said urn. The cult leader was promised the urn by her mother and since it has an emotional connection to Summer, she has setup an elaborate hoax to avoid handing it over to the Shirosama. It is not until the Shirosama tries to kidnap her that she realizes the extent he will go in order to get his hands on the urn.

Taka is out to recover the same urn and is willing to do anything to stop the Shirosama from getting his hand on the artifact as well as the information that Summer doesn't know she has. But when the time comes to kill Summer he balks and everything goes downhill.

The difference between this operative (who I really liked in the other book) and Peter is that Genevieve made the whole I've fallen for you and now cannot kill you believable. There was NO reason why Summer should have fallen for Taka. He showed no emotion and really did nothing that could explain to me why she was hot for him and why she eventually fell for him. The reader knew Taka and could see his struggles but Summer should have had no clue. For some reason Stuart failed to show me how these two fell in love and it took away from the book.

I still enjoyed the action and being a Japanese culture junky, the chases around Japan moved this book from a D to a C-.

Because this last book was such a disappointment I think I need to stop reading this series for awhile so that I will not prejudice myself to book 4 which is the story of Madame Lambert or book 5 which is the story of Summer's sister Jilly and Taka's cousin Reno which were excellently portrayed in Ice Blue.

Format: Audiobook/eBook