French Peril
Mona RiskRomantic suspense
Available from Cerridwen Press
ISBN: 9781419917189
June 2008
| When her esteemed professor and mentor is taken ill and unable to travel to France to participate in the restoration of a chapel at a chateau, he urges Cheryl to take his laptop and his place. One paper shy of her Ph. D. she is actually the one who did all the research and plans on Chateau Valroux’s chapel anyway. She is hoping to find a lost statue that will make a great topic for that last important paper. Things go bad quickly, he mentor’s condition did not improve and someone is after the mysteriously lost statue that the very handsome and charismatic French Comte insists to the other workers does not exist. There is also an explosive attraction between the two of them despite evidence that he is involved with another woman.
This is a wonderfully exciting romantic suspense novel. The characters are appealing and the setting is very romantic, a chateau in the Loire Valley. There is an interesting cast of characters; a handsome and sexy Comte, five vaguely sinister graduate students intent on finding a mysterious statue, not rebuilding the chapel as they were hired to, a group of intensely loyal servants, a sophisticated sister, and a supposedly unwanted but very determined ex-girlfriend. The plot is full of action and the reader is never sure who is on the side of good or evil. As a matter of fact, very few are who they appear to be. The love story between Francois the Comte and Cheryl is very engrossing all on its own. Francois seems to have a fear of commitment but is very possessive of Cheryl, leading him to act jealous and angry and not the suave sophisticate he would like to appear. Cheryl is a very earnest grad student, though she appears to be studying something other than architecture, the author would have been better to make her major history, archeology, or even architectural history. I really liked her character; she has spunk as well as brains. The various plotlines converge into a very exciting climax that will surprise the reader.
Overall rating:
Reviewer: Maura Frankman |
