Madeleine Ker; art by Mayu Kasumi, Never Kiss a Stranger

Never Kiss a Stranger

Madeleine Ker; art by Mayu Kasumi

Harlequin Pink, Sep 2006, $7.99

ISBN: 0373180039

Popular but lonely romance writer Mamie Pendergast and her assistant Laura Golightly are in Nice, France where the author plans to write her next book. However, due to a hotel mix-up, the room she always uses has been given to a Mr. Ivan Actopal leaving an irate Mamie next door. Not long afterward Laura catches a thief wearing a mask in their room. She goes into protective mode, but the felon leaves.

The next night at a reception, Mamie introduces Laura to her friend Caesar Labertov, CEO and chief designer of Aeromed Airplane manufacturing. Laura recognizes him from his eyes and voice as the thief who took nothing except a kiss. Laura and Caesar are attracted to one another and she shows her intelligence when she realizes he was seeking something from Actopal not Mamie. He explains that someone stole a CD with design data for the Churchill plane model and sold it to Actopal who plans to sell it to Caesar's rival Cyrus. As Laura and Caesar fall in love, she not only trusts him she risks her life to try to get back the CD.

This is a cute tale that targets twelve to thirteen years old girls as Manga art is combined with a fun wholesome romantic suspense with less of a message than the previous Harlequin Pink tales contain. The art and text of this graphic book is excellent though readers will have to adjust to the right to left story line even with an instruction page included. As with No Competition and Jinxed, a paradigm is needed to accept manga in romance instead of the usual fantasy, but worth the time as Never Kiss A Stranger is a well written and well drawn thriller.

Harriet Klausner