Romance

Ritual Sins by Anne Stuart

Karen Wheless


This is a somewhat notorious book by Anne Stuart that I’ve been holding on to for some time.

Ritual Sins by Anne Stuart
(1997, Suspense)
Grade: 4

Rachel Connery arrives in New Mexico to confront Luke Bardell, the leader of The Foundation of Being, which seems to be a cult that attracts the wealthy. Rachel’s mother died of cancer and left 12 million dollars to the Foundation. Although Rachel was estranged from her mother, she is determined to find out more about the group and its charismatic leader.

Although this book didn’t completely work as a romance, it was an interesting read. It’s always entertaining to see how Anne Stuart can turn a completely unlikely and unsympathetic character into a believable hero. Luke begins the book as a character who is confident in his own strength and ability to con people. He’s not particularly sympathetic but he is fascinating. Rachel is equally closed off at the beginning. The relationship between them is based on Luke’s desire to dominate and Rachel’s determination to resist. As the book continues, we find out more about their pasts, but strangely, I never felt that this added to their emotional connection. Stuart kept me interested in Luke even after he does some pretty despicable things (some of the sex scenes border on rape) but she didn’t make me believe that the relationship between Luke and Rachel developed much beyond sexual attraction. The book worked better as a mystery / character study than as a romance, but still, it was interesting and worth reading.

Hopefully Blogger won’t mangle this post the way it did the last one! I’m trying to hang onto my old computer since I can’t afford to replace all my software at once, and I’m running out of hard disk space on my laptop, but it’s getting harder and harder when even a simple thing like posting a blog entry becomes “incompatible” with the old systems.

Karen Wheless

I've been reading romance since I discovered Kathleen Woodiwiss at age 12. I love all kinds of romances, especially emotional and angsty stories. I finally cut back my TBR pile from 2000 books to only 400, but I still have lots of books left to read!

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