After not having read anything by Jayne Ann Krentz in at least five years, I wondered whether or not she stood the test of time and decided it was worth the effort of re-reading my favorite of her books – Grand Passion – to find out. Was the book as good as I remembered? I headed for the library and checked it out and am happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Ten years after its original publication, this romance still has the power to make me smile.

It doesn’t start at all well. The prologue introduces our hero, the tall, dark, and – let’s face it – kind of strange Max Fortune. It is written in short, choppy sentences that tell us, in the tones of a lecturer talking to small children, that Max is (a) rich; (b) tormented; (c) yearning for love and a home but (d) unable to trust that he’ll ever have them. All in less than two pages. This is storytelling at its most unsubtle.

Max became rich by working for hotelier Jason Curzon, and he spends much of his money buying modern art. On his deathbed, Jason bequeathed to Max five masterpieces by Amos Lutrell, and told him to go to see Cleopatra Robbins at her little inn on the coast if he wants to find the paintings. Max does, convinced that this Cleopatra must be Jason’s scheming mistress. Cleo is not what Max expects: she is pretty, nice, wears jeans and metallic-toned sneakers, and hangs uninteresting seascapes on her walls. She doesn’t seem glamorous or sophisticated enough to appreciate either Jason or the Lutrell paintings. One of Cleo’s staff just went missing, so when she hears that Max is an old friend of Jason’s, she immediately recruits him to do the kind of odd job that Jason used to do around the inn: fix a toilet.

So begins the attraction of these two opposites. Cleo is a woman who lost her family several years ago, so she has deliberately drawn about her created a family of close friends. Jason was one of the family, and Cleo adopts Max into it as well, not realizing that he’s come to the inn with an agenda and a few preconceived notions. Max, an orphan, longs for family but is afraid to believe that he deserves it. Cleo is exactly what Max needs.

There’s a strong suspense subplot here; someone has been sending nasty notes to Cleo and to others close to her, apparently motivated by the fact that she published an erotic novel called The Mirror. As the stalker gets increasingly creepy, Max is more motivated to protect Cleo. In my opinion, the suspense stuff is not very strong or surprising, but it’s not a huge drawback either.

As they fall in love, Cleo and Max stage certain scenes from Cleo’s book. Since the love scenes are purportedly inspired by erotica, you might think they’d be, well, erotic. I would say that they’re warm at most. Krentz is good at using the love scenes to further the plot and to show us how the characters’ relationship is developing.

The amazing thing about Krentz is that she can take this initially very simple situation – a man who needs a home and a woman who can provide it – and turn it into something really interesting and moving. That happens because Cleo and Max are both more than they seem; they come alive as real and complex characters. The more we learn about Max’s lonely outlook on live, the more we come to care about him. And Cleo, like so many Krentz heroines, is both a lot smarter and a lot more complex than she seems at first. By the second half of the book, people are constantly warning Cleo to stay away from Max, because he’s no good for her; but her faith in him never wavers. And I cried during the scene in which Max asks Cleo to marry him. I’m not a big crier; when it happens, it means that the book has really got me.

To sum up: Grand Passion is as much a favorite of mine as it ever was. How nice to discover that even after all these years, it still works for me.