![]() Jake believes that Kyle and the Donovans, a colorful family, have framed him for the crime Kyle's family believes that Jake has set Kyle up and the CIA is trailing Jake and Honor to get its hands on the Amber Room, as are the Russian mafiya, a Lithuanian freedom fighter, ex-employees of the former KGB, and the Coast Guard. Like most heroes of his ilk, he comes complete with scars, black stubble, and the requisite ``clean fingernails'' (which is typical for the genre: only villains have problems with personal hygiene). got the T shirt'') is a former government agent who now manages his own international investment company. (Honor needs a boat to find Kyle, and she doesn't know how to pilot a boat in fact, she hates boats, and she hates fishing.) Kyle, it seems, has disappeared from Russia with a million dollars' worth of Baltic amber and, perhaps, a priceless panel from the famous Amber Room, which had been disassembled and taken from a czar's palace by the Nazis. ![]() Tough Jake Mallory (Jake being this year's romance-novel nom de choice for soldiers of fortune and macho men) passes himself off as a fishing guide in order to keep tabs on Honor Donovan, a jewelry designer who's searching for her lost brother Kyle in the San Juan Islands. With its subzero temperatures that will make you reach for a blanket and a wounded but never weakened heroine, Kells' assured debut is a winner.Ī well-made, completely predictable and unchallenging second hardcover from Lowell (Winter Fire, 1996)-a romance that offers all the sexual tension, adventure, and squishy clichÇs that fans of the genre could possibly want. The children, and their growing adoration for their surrogate forest parents in the wake of the crash that orphaned them, are integral to the story and as such are realistically depicted, much to Kells' credit. It's clear early on that the press' version of the story and the truth are not one and the same, but Kells cleverly teases out exactly how the two accounts differ as readers come to learn more about Avery, particularly her complicated relationships with Colin and with the sport of swimming itself. It would be easy to keep readers in suspense about the group's overall fate, but Kells makes the more interesting choice to alternate among the events leading up to the crash, the five-day wilderness ordeal and Avery's bumpy recovery. After the first day, Avery, Colin and three little boys-Tim, 6, Liam, 4, and toddler Aayu-are the only survivors. But when she takes a crowded flight back east for Thanksgiving, along with fellow swimmer Colin Shea, the plane goes down in the Rockies. Sophomore Avery Delacorte is excited to make her mark on the cutthroat college swimming circuit far from her native Boston and her controlling father. Kells expertly ratchets up the tension in her thrilling debut novel as she shifts back and forth between the frigid Colorado wilderness and chlorinated pools. ![]() A plane crash in the Rockies leaves more than physical scars on an up-and-coming competitive college swimmer.
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