I just finished a marvelous Linda Howard book featuring a secret agent in deep cover and in deep trouble and the brave and resourceful woman who saves his life and falls in love with him. No, it wasn’t her latest hardcover All The Queen’s Men, I’m talking about Diamond Bay, one of Howard’s earlier and very much better books.

Kell Sabin is the agent. He is in deep cover and the ultimate loner. He has few friends, is divorced and is the type of man for whom a normal life is just not possible. One day while Kell is vacationing – alone – on a boat in the Gulf, he is attacked and shot. Kell is rescued by Rachel Jones, a 30 year old widow who lives alone with her pets in a small house near the beach.

Rachel had been an investigative reporter and her husband was killed by a car bomb meant for her. Now she teaches and runs a couple of souvenir shops. When she finds Kell shot and unconscious, her reporter’s instincts kick in. She knows that he is in trouble and sometimes the authorities are not a safe haven, so she calls her friend Honey, a veterinarian, to treat him. Since Honey is not an MD, she will not have to report a gunshot victim to the authorites.

Rachel nurses Kell back to health and when he regains consciousness, the attraction between them is immediate and palpable. When Linda Howard is on target, no one can do sexual attraction like she can and she is right on the money in this book. Kell is very much a Linda Howard hero – all hairy chest, hard muscle and high gear sex drive – but he is not an arrogant jerk, thank goodness! He and Rachel are together for almost the entire book and they make one of Linda Howard’s most memorable couples. Their love scenes are as intense as any I have read. They are marked by deep mutual desire and caring and lack the edge of cruelty that Linda Howard sometimes injects into her love scenes.

Rachel is a perfect match for Kell. Unlike Sallie from An Independent Wife, Rachel is not one of Linda Howard’s silky ineffectual heroines who spends her time fighting in vain against the dominating hero. Rachel is independent, strong and loving. The main conflict between them is the danger that Kell’s work is to him and to her if she continues to associate with him. Rachel, having faced danger and death as a reporter, does not fear it. She shows herself to be resourceful and brave in a crisis and is one of my favorite Linda Howard heroines.

Like many readers, I had looked forward to John Medina’s story in All the Queen’s Men and I was very disappointed in that book. I know that Linda Howard can write romantic suspense as good as any one around (read Dream Man to see what I mean). In the case of All the Queen’s Men the romance, the suspense and the passion were lacking. In Diamond Bay, Howard wrote a passionate book that did full justice to the characters, the suspense and the romance and it is by far the better book.