Finding love in the deadliest of circumstances
What must it be like to have not one but two men out to kill you? This is a question that our heroine, Dr Ellie Sullivan, presumably asks herself, although we don’t get a great deal of introspection in this book. What we get instead is a fairly standard romance story with various subplots to keep it moving.
Ellie hasn’t really thought of what her ideal husband would be like, but Max Daniels would definitely not fit her initial idea.
An FBI agent who lives 4,000 miles away in Honolulu, he is on the scene of a failed FBI arrest when Ellie finds herself a witness to the shooting of an agent--and to the shooters. She
becomes heavily involved when she operates on the agent (she’s a trauma surgeon) as well as trying to identify those behind the shooting.
The action fairly quickly moves to Ellie’s hometown in South Carolina, where she is meant to be attending her sister’s wedding--the sister who seduced Ellie’s fiancé when she first took him home to meet her family. But Agent Max Daniels is concerned for Ellie’s safety as a witness so
he travels with her, only to discover that a danger from her past is also reappearing in her life.
I found The Ideal Man a light,
enjoyable, easy-to-read story. We don’t delve that deeply into anyone’s characters; there are various subplots that keep
reader interest (such as Ellie’s sister, Annie, and her love life), and the hero is suitably manly if rather indistinct.
Both Max and Ellie are rather standard characters for this kind of book (Max the tall, dark, handsome, virile man, and Ellie the caring, generous doctor), but I liked their interactions and the fact that Ellie seems to
cope well with a dramatically difficult series of events in her early teens.
The Ideal Man is a good story
that will undoubtedly appeal to Julie Garwood’s fans.