Ice Blue

By: Anne Stuart

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Museum curator Summer Hawthorne considered the exquisite ice-blue ceramic bowl given to her by her beloved Japanese nanny a treasure of sentimental value, until somebody tried to kill her for it.

The priceless relic is about to ignite a global power struggle that must be stopped at all costs. It's a desperate situation, and international operative Takashi O'Brien has received his directive: everybody is expendable. Everybody. Especially the woman who is getting dangerously under his skin as the lethal game crosses the Pacific to the remote and beautiful mountains of Japan, where the truth can be as seductive as it is deadly.

©2007 Anne Stuart (P)2007 Audible, Inc.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A. All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Critic reviews

"Slick, sexy, and fast-paced, this is one of Stuart's best recent efforts. Taka is a singularly intriguing hero, and readers won't soon forget his love with Summer." (Romantic Times)

Stockholm Syndrome...at its worst!

Yuck, the main female lead character is so submissive you end up disliking her so much, and wanting to refer her to therapy to work out her ISSUES. She has a doctrite but is unable to figure things out. Summer, the main character falls for the guy who spends the first 5 hours of the book fantasizing about killing her in the quickest, least painful way. And ummm, he is merciful! I think I went into a fugue state because I never really felt the sincerity of the importance of the sacred object or the journey of the book. It just seemed like a book developed too quickly, and I like a bit more research in a story as well as a strong female characters. I was not endeared to any of the characters. The sex scenes seemed more like "she said no but means yes", due to the submissive nature of the Summer and the sexually confident Tako. There was so much more that could have been said, and having more dialogue might have helped (alot of thinking to themselves). This is a quick read that I will be quickly forgot and should have been bought at a used book store but not for the value of an audible.

I like the narrator. I will skip the other books in the series.

Say "blahblah" then repeat 3000 times

I almost never use one star, reserving it to mean the very worst a book can be. For Ice Blue, this rating is well deserved. It's a real stand-out in the abysmal category.

It's bad enough that the characters and events have no believability of any kind. But then Stuart repeats everything ad nauseum. How many dozens of times did she describe the male character's appearance? 30? 50? How many times are we told that he's ambivalent about the attraction? How many times do we have to hear that killing the "heroine" is the right thing to do? Killing the book is more like it, and once would have been sufficient. [How on earth does tripe like this get published?]

Reader is Passable; But Pass on Reading This Book

The Ice Blue reviews I read made it seem like a well-written mystery. Well, I found it to be a sex-spiced "romance novel" (which in my book is a genre I prefer not to visit). Big letdown, but since I listened to it as an audio book instead of plowing through it reading I stuck to the end because the reader did a passable job. As far as rating - what I suggest to anyone who is considering reading this: just pass on to something else with more content.

perfectly awful

Wow.. a quadruple threat! Poor flat non-inflective reader, really awful characters and character development, unbelievable setup, and, to top it all off, glorified rape fantasies! Thank goodness I got this one on sale so I only wasted a few dollars on it! Take my advice and don't waste your dollars.

Ice Blue

Sweet ending but the least entertaining of the "Ice" series. The plot was okay but the character developments were repetitive and mundane. Finally, and foremost, the narrator excelled at being monotone and boring. Please no repeat performances.