A somewhat complex storyline involving missing boats, Russians and Georgians, the CIA and the FBI and international water laws. Emma Cross works for St. Kilda Consulting and she's been tasked with following a boat called the Blackbird, which is a twin to another boat that went missing. It is somehow linked to threats to destroy a U.S. city, but I wasn't able to follow that so well. She meets up with Mac Durand, who is ex-special ops and is now a transit captain for a company that is outfitting Blackbird for transit. He gets recruited to St. Kilda and he and Emma become partners (and lovers). So they're trying to solve a mystery, dodging U.S. agencies and foreign terrorists. It's pretty action-packed.

I read a story like this as much for the romance as I do the suspense plot. As good as the suspense plot was, I was disappointed by the romance. Emma and Mac have some fantastic sexual chemistry and work really well together as partners and friends. I liked them together. But there was no struggle (or time really) for them to get together or even for them to stay together. It felt like a brushed off romance that could have easily remained a friendship or partnership. Not one of them mentioned the word love or even shared much of themselves as people that we saw. The entire focus here was suspense, rather than character development. And that's why three stars instead of 4. I read for the characters first and foremost, angst and or suspense is secondary to me. ( )

Actual rating: 3.5 stars

There was a point early in the book where I wasn't sure if I was going to have to DNF or not. It was so slow to get going and way too overly detailed on yacht piloting and such.

Once the action picked up a bit, it got a lot better.

Emma is a former CIA agent hired by St Kilda Consulting (this is the 5th in the series and the first I've read). She's working on cases involving insurance fraud and yachts. She's on the trail of a ship named Blackbird, and Mac (former special ops) is a transit captain hired to take the yacht to get it's final bits and bobs installed. The two team up when it's discovered that others want the boat for nefarious reasons.

I enjoyed the developing relationship between the two main characters, Emma and Mac. But as the book takes place over the course of nine days--with the bulk of the book taking place over six days, and the final chapter set three days later--I had a tiny bit of a hard time believing in their HEA. HFN, for sure, though. No "I love yous" were exchanged, but the two deep form a connection based on more than just physical attraction, and I can see things working out for them in the long run. I like that there was zero angst between the two of them. They were attracted to each other, they acted on it, they worked together to defeat the bad guys. ( )

Elizabeth Lowell is one of my favorite writers, and I love the St. Kilda series. I really enjoyed this book: great story, interesting characters, which is what I've come to expect from Lowell. Some have commented that the large amount of nautical how-to in the book put them off. I agree that it was a lot of detail, but it wasn't just a dry recitation of facts. Lowell built the detail into the action, into the sensory experience, and for a few pages, I knew what it felt like to race across a raging sea, in a damaged yacht...to save the world. :-) To me, delving into the unknown is one of the pleasures of reading. I don't pretend to understand it all, and I can't say I didn't skim over some of the more technical parts :-), but it didn't bother me.

( )

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I enjoyed this book a lot, let's get that straight right away.

The story starts in Seattle and makes a counter-clockwise trip around Vancouver Island aboard a 41', black-hulled performance yacht (powered, I'd guess, by dual Volvo/Penta IPS pod-drives, which feature prominently). The main characters, besides the boat, are a slightly bitter ex-Special Ops sniper (male) and a slightly-more-bitter ex CIA operative (female), both young, extremely attractive, and yes, sex-positive. Their support team includes a married couple (and their infant daughter), now private security consultants and the protagonists' boss, as well as a wicked-smart and well-connected ex-ambassador in a wheelchair who I think is everyone's employer.

The bad guys are Eastern European, sort of mafiya/terrorists with a definite terrorist emphasis.

After finishing the book, thinking about it some, and even talking it over with my wife, I still don't get one of the major plot-points. Much of the dialogue between the protagonists is hard to believe, that characters border on genre stereotypes and the male-lead never quite comes into focus. But, I like boats and I like thrillers, and I'm happy to overlook shortcomings of the latter if I get a serving of the former. ( )