This book has been languishing on my paperback shelf for perhaps nine or ten months now, I bought it at the small bookstore our library has to raise money. Paperbacks are a quarter and hardcovers only a dollar, often you can get a bagful of books for the price of one new paperback at Boarders. You don't feel guilty about impulse purchases and if you never read it, well hopefully I can afford a quarter. This one sat around for a while but I finally got around to it.I have to say that sheiks and sand have never held much appeal for me, I wouldn't mind seeing the Holy Land, in fact I hope to one day but the whole Arab culture has never held much mystique for me. Tasha Alexander's fourth Lady Emily mystery, Tears of Pearl, had her inside a harem in Constantinople and I found the whole thing totally uninteresting, the cultural basis is so unappealing I really don't even want to read about it. Ethnocentric, especially coming from an anthropologist, but you can see why I had my doubts about a book set in the Middle East during the Crusades.
To Johansen's credit she does her damnedest to get around the nontraditional setting, her hero is Scottish (and why not?) and by the end of the book the main characters find cause to return there. There isn't a whole lot of wandering around the desert on camels in white robes and turbans, which is what I feared. The plot includes a lot of interesting side details about embroidery and the creation of silk, the Knights Templar, and falconry which certainly is unusual. I was immediately a fan of the heroine's name, Thea, if for no other reason than that the one year I lived on campus in college a girl named Thea lived in the suite next to ours. She was an Avon girl, which I found very cute, I was even guilted into buying a foot care kit from her that I gave to my mother for her birthday. I digress but how can one resist Avon calling?
The scope of the story is long, covering five years with a lot of downtime, which cools off the romance considerably. Lord Ware the hero is remarkably unsexy in may ways, the first one that comes to mind is his demand that the heroine stay and watch while a whore gives him a blow job, but then again love conquers all and covers a multitude of sins. I like it enough, gross chauvinism aside, to want to read the sequel The Treasure, published a mere twelve years later in 2008. I'll report when I do.
