the tiger princeSandra Brown is one of my favorite authors. Tiger Prince #112 (SIM) was writ­ten under Brown’s pen name of Erin St. Claire for the Sil­hou­ette Inti­mate Moments (SIM) line.

I have a rel­a­tively good track record with San­dra Brown because I actu­ally started with her roman­tic sus­pense nov­els Cha­rade (1995) and The Wit­ness (1996). Then I slowly made my way through her romance back­list. Have they reprinted them all yet?

I remem­bered hear­ing good things about Tiger Prince sev­eral years ago and had picked it up to read later. Well later is now. I was pre­pared for good things, all things considered.

In Tiger Prince, a divorceé goes on vaca­tion to Jamaica and finds love, romance and adven­ture. How sweet. Caren Blake­more works for the U.S. State Depart­ment. She’s made a diplo­matic error that is some­what embar­rass­ing to the agency. As a result she’s been asked to take vaca­tion leave in order to avoid being sus­pended, which she does.

Caren’s self-confidence is at an all time low because her hus­band left her for another woman. While on vaca­tion, she reluc­tantly embraces the idea of a fling with no strings attached. So here comes jet-setting play­boy with the seduc­tive “tiger eyes” Derek Allen. He makes him­self avail­able to Caren. He’s actu­ally more than she can han­dle and he is deter­mined to seduce her and he does.

The two have a pas­sion­ate affair that lit up the island. What Caren doesn’t know is that Derek’s hid­ing an explo­sive secret. The story then turns into a mar­riage of con­ve­nience story. What Caren didn’t real­ize was that she was inad­ver­tently involved in a major polit­i­cal snafu that threat­ens her job. The sec­ond half of the story involves the after­math of the Jamaica fling fol­lowed by moments of truth and dec­la­ra­tions of love.

The story is very sen­sual and very dated. A lot of cliché’s and tropes that today I just can’t stom­ach much any­more. My response to the story is a mixed bag. I liked some parts of it and oth­ers I could have did with­out. Brown is good with sex­ual chem­istry and she gets a gold star for that but over­all, C+ read.

I’m sure some read­ers would prob­a­bly enjoy this story today despite it’s dat­ed­ness. It has a some­what solid plot and has a hero who is very demand­ing yet sexy. Explo­sive secrets and the redis­cov­er­ing of one­self are big themes in here. The reprint edi­tion comes with the dreaded “dear reader” let­ter, where the author explains to her new read­er­ship that she once wrote “romances” some twenty years ago and “that as in all romances, expect a happy end­ing.” Yes and this one has a rather sappy one at that. C+.

If you’re new to San­dra Brown, the Tiger Prince is not a good place to start. May I sug­gest Mir­ror Image, French Silk, Play Dirty, Cha­rade, The Wit­ness, Ric­o­chet and sev­eral oth­ers. Just not this one.

This review is apart of the TBR chal­lenge that my fel­low read­ers and I are par­tic­i­pat­ing in this year. Please take the time to visit the other read­ers in this chal­lenge and thank you.