Sakura of DOOM

I've held off on writing this, as I feel it needs more brain power than I possess to write a review that compares and contrasts it with Stuart's Moonrise with a particular examination of gendered roles in romance novels. Unfortunately, if I don't write this now, I'll put it off forever and end up forgetting half of what I wanted to say.

Ice Storm belongs in the unfortunately tiny subgenre of romance books that includes Megan Chance's Fall from Grace and Connie Brockway's All Through the Night; that is, they all star icy and morally dubious heroes and heroines and aren't so much romances as erotic power play. Parts of it also strongly resemble Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart, particularly in the way both heroes of the books are undone by sex, rather than gaining power through the sexual desires of the heroines, which is how most romances go.

Isobel Lambert is the head of a shady international organization called the Committee (as all shady international organizations are called, unless they are "the Institution" or "the Institute"). The Committee is supposedly on the side of good, though they do things like assassinate inconvenient people and overthrow governments. They now must protect an Eastern European international terrorist to get information. Little does Isobel know that he's actually Killian, the first man she fell in love with, the first man she killed, and also the reason why she stopped being innocent, sweet Mary Curwen and started being icy assassin Isobel Lambert.

This is the fourth book in a series; I could tell because there are three other couples. Sadly, all the prior books seem to be on male assassins and the innocent, beautiful women they are supposed to protect and/or kill. One of the couples has jokingly named one of their babies (there are lots of babies) "Swede" in honor of the Stockholm Syndrome.

I think they found that much more sappy and romantic than I did.

I suspect Anne Stuart would have written something much darker and more erotic if she thought it would have sold; either that, or she's so used to writing within romance genre constraints that they infest the book despite its boundary-pushing content. I would have loved this ten times more had it discarded the couples, the babies, and the gender roles. That said, I still loved this a lot for what it did do with genre tropes, and it would have earned a place on my bookshelf just for the heroine's final line. Also, it is hot like burning.

Even so, I actually wish this one had more sex, or at least more detailed sex (this may be a first for me, at least in the romance genre). The most interesting changes to the characters happen in bed, and I'm grumpy that we get the lead-in, a brief summary, and then the morning after, because it definitely needed something like the POV change in Shadowheart.

( Race )

( Gender )

( More gender, with spoilers )

I'd rec this if you like the aforementioned Kinsale, Chase, or Brockway books, even though Ice Storm is the most flawed of them all. That's really unfortunate, because if you squint past all the romance novel trappings, there would be a killer story.

Some day I will get the complete gender inversion of the usual killer alpha male hero and the sweet innocent heroine, and it will be the BEST THING EVER. Till then, I will satisfy myself with books that at least take on romance tropes, if not always successfully.

ETA: corrected horrible grammar errors