book watch: Naked Edge by Pamela Clare

Right, February 2010 is a little ways away but that will give you enough time to get caught up with Pamela Clare's I-Team series (if you aren't already)! These romantic suspense stories are praised for their research and authenticity (as well as very memorable sexy scenes :) and center around the women of an investigative team. Ms. Clare has a full-time journalism career as the editor of a local paper, and would clearly know what her characters are up to.

I have read this author's historicals, and from visiting her blog I'm very impressed by the care and time she obviously puts into the background and characters of her stories. Pamela has very kindly permitted me to post the blurb (as unofficially written in her own words) for Naked Edge:

Katherine James lives torn between two worlds: the world of her traditional Navajo upbringing and the mainstream world where she works as an investigative reporter. She has vowed not to get involved casually with men, but to save her heart and her virginity for her "half-side" - the man who is meant to be her partner through life. But her resolve is challenged when Gabe Rossiter enters her world, first saving her life after she is nearly killed in a rock slide and then helping to protect her first when the sweat lodge ceremony she's participating in is inexplicably raided by police, and then again after the wachisa wakan "medicine man" who has been a father to her turns up dead near the sweat lodge.

Boulder Mountain Parks Ranger Gabe Rossiter has no use for love in his life. Experience has proved to him that there is no such thing as love. There is only physical chemistry, the hormonal reaction of a man to a woman. But after Kat literally falls into his life, feelings he has vowed never to feel again begin to stir. And though he tries at first to keep his distance (the woman is a VIRGIN, for goodness sake) life keeps throwing them together, first when police raid the sweat lodge and then again when hell breaks loose on what is sacred land to Indian people.

As bullets begin to fly, their relationship reaches a point where one of them must give for both of them to survive and find happiness.

Sounds like a most exciting and romantic read! You can find great Naked Edge excerpts and progress updates (as time allows, since the manuscript deadline is July 15th to the publisher) on Pamela's blog. I fear the book's release date is now heading towards March of next year, but it will be worth the wait. Until then, I have some more reading of my own to do!