Karen Does Anne Stuart's Cold As Ice...

As you know, I read Cold As Ice last week. I can’t be arsed blathering on, so without further ado, here’s the blurb, KarenS stylie:

Girl Clueless Lawyer has to hand deliver some mega important documents to Evil Billionaire Pedo, so she accepts an invitation onto his mega-bucks boat.


What Girl Clueless Lawyer doesn’t realise is that Evil Billionaire Pedo wants to make her his Bitch.


All Girl Clueless Lawyer wants to do is to get Evil Billionaire Pedo to sign the papers, so that she can jet off to her holiday in the Costa Rican rainforest (This woman wears $750 shoes, and we’re expected to believe that she digs sleeping with bugs?).


Girl Clueless Lawyer thinks that Evil Pedo is odd, (what clued her in I wonder?) but not as odd as his assistant, Peter The Assassin.


Unbeknownst to GCL, Peter The Assasin has been ordered to kill Evil Pedo, before he puts his Rule of Seven campaign of terror into action. (I can’t be arsed explaining what the Rule Of Seven is, sorry).


Unfortunately for Peter The Assasin, Girl Clueless Lawyer keeps getting in his way, and somehow manages to fuck up everything. Again and again.


Ultimately, our hero has to decide between saving the woman he loves Let the bitch die at the risk of failing in his mission impossible task, or ridding the world of Evil Pedo, at the risk of losing the woman he loves (blech).

Hmm hard decision huh? not really. What ever will he do…..?

My Verdict

Jesus. Effing. Christ.

You know, I am such a character reader that if one of the two lead characters in a romance book fail to lift me, then fairly, or unfairly, it’s very difficult for me to completely enjoy said book.

Cold As Ice probably would have been ok if the heroine, Genevieve (Or Genny The Effing Twat, as she will be known for the rest of this review), had met an untimely death early on in the book.

In one of Ms Stuart’s interviews, she told the interviewer that she had purposely created a ‘strong’ heroine for Peter ‘Cold As Ice’ more like soft as shite Jensen. Where did it all go wrong?

Genevieve wasn’t strong, not even a little bit. She was just plain thick as pigshit, hell, quite frankly I’m insulting pigshit by making the comparison.

Even when Jensen was clearly trying to save her, she kept insisting on trying to escape from him. Where did the bitch think she could go with a billionaire psychopath after her? Oh yeah, she wanted to go home. Makes sense.

Give me an effing break.

There was a point in the book (you know the part I mean Bam) where she did something so stupid, that if it wasn’t for the fact that I'd spent my heard earned money on CAI, I would have chucked the goddamn book out of the window.

I’m an advocate of authors who write strong heroines, but Genny The Effing Twat wasn’t strong, she embodied every single pet peeve I have about romantic heroines. She was ridiculously naïve, (come on, you don’t get to be junior partner in a well established law firm by being a frickin Pollyanna) she didn’t seem to mind that her employers expected her to sleep with a client just to get a signature on a document, and she somehow managed to miss the fact that she was all alone on a boat with a psycho.

Another thing that annoyed me about Genny The Effing Twat, was that at no point in this book was I convinced that she felt anything for Peter Jensen other than an inconvenient sexual pull, which could have easily been explained away by the fact that she hadn’t experienced a good seeing to, for a long time, and had a bad case of fungi-growth where her vagina should have been.

I think it’s a sad indictment when the best bit in the book, involving the heroine, is during a scene where she’s being tortured by Evil Pedo. Oh how I rejoiced.

Anyway, I could go on and on about how moronic GTET was, but to be honest, I’m giving myself a migraine just thinking about her, so I’ll move on to Peter Jensen shall I?

I liked Peter Jensen, but he was no Bastien Toussaint. Bastien was such a bad ass that I never really knew where I stood with him. He was as likely to slit the heroine’s throat, as to shag her senseless. I like those kind of heroes best, I suspect that this is a sick perversion that I share with Bam.

I never really got the sense that Jensen was as ‘Cold As Ice’, as we are lead to believe in the back cover blurb. The man had too many vulnerabilities, and seemed to suffer from very untimely attacks of conscience.

Although I felt that Jensen genuinely cared about GTET, I really didn’t get why. As far as I could tell, she had no redeeming features whatsoever, and she nearly got him killed on a number of occasions. Who needs a bint who’ll happily spend $750 on a pair of Manolo’s, bitch about those extra 15lbs round her hips that she just can’t shift, and hasn’t got a clue, when she’s in the clutches of an evil arsehole?

Unfortunately for Jensen, because the heroine was such a let down, he was kinda tainted by her. I think if he’d had a different heroine, somebody like Imelda Marcos maybe, but with less under-arm hair I would have enjoyed CAI a whole lot more.

OK, now onto the secondary characters. Or at least, one of the secondary characters.

Harry ‘I love little boys’ Van Dorn.

It’s been a long time since I’ve come across a villain, who was just sooooo evil. I mean not only was the man a cold-blooded murderer, and rapist, but he was also a perve with a penchant for children. Could he be more evil?

Give me a break.

Harry was the ultimate cookie cutter villain, complete with smiling icy blue eyes, and a way with the ladies. Didn’t buy his evilness for a second. Quite frankly, I would have been more convinced if he had actually killed the twat of a heroine when he had the chance.

Also for an established career criminal, he was just too inept for words. I also felt that a psycho who was as paranoid as Harry was purported to be, would have had video cameras all over his property (not just in the bedroom, where the heroine was getting undressed), and been more careful about who he hired.

One of the things that I loved about Black Ice, was the fact that the plotting was so damned good. I can’t in all honesty say that about Cold As Ice.

It was just so damned painful. I was expecting it to be fast-paced, but all I got was slow and tedious. Yes, I too was underwhelmed.

I spent the majority of the book waiting for something really truly scrumptious to happen, but alas, the pages went on, and on, and on, and on, and eventually, when I reached the end, I felt as if I’d just come out of a deep coma.

At no time was I gripped by this book, in fact at one point, I started mentally doing my company tax returns for the quarter. I’m pretty sure that’s not a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, Cold As Ice was still really well-written, after all, this is Anne Stuart we’re talking about here, but it just didn’t have that X-Factor, that was evident all the way through Black Ice.

I wanted to love CAI, I really did, but I think what happens when an author writes a superb book, is that all their other books are compared to That Great Book forever and evah, and more often than not, the other books, are found lacking. Sigh.

If I had read Cold As Ice before Black Ice, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more, but because I know how fantastic Anne Stuart’s characters can be, I couldn’t help but be disappointed that this book just didn’t live up to the hype.

Oh well, better luck next time.