Review: `Someone was watching her...'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 20, 2014
Michigan born author Rita Clay Estrada, now living in Texas, has had a colorful life, always stirred with Romance. She and her mother, former Miss Michigan Rita Gallagher, wrote romance stories - her mother's in magazines and Rita's in books. She wrote under assumed names Rita Clay, Tira Lacy (an anagram of Rita Clay) and Rita Clay Estrada. So devoted to the craft of romance tales she and her mother co-founded Romance Writers of America and was the first president. Their signature award, the RITA, which is the highest award of excellence given in the genre of romantic fiction, is named for her. The RWA also awarded Estrada their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In addition to publishing 44 books she has given workshops and keynote speeches at national conferences, universities and library systems throughout the country. Along with her writing, Rita is also a Catastrophe Insurance Adjuster schooled and specializing in Environmental Disasters. She goes across the country talking to people involved in gas well blowouts, oil disasters to chemical fires. Those jobs can last from two months to two years, depending on the amount of people and damages involved. During the last four years, when she wasn't working as an adjuster, she sailed the Caribbean, up the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico on a 38-foot sailboat. Rita makes her home in Spring, TX where she began RWA and raised her four children.THE IVORY KEY was originally published in 1987 and apparently it was one of the first romance novels to include paranormal elements. AS such it is a landmark and reading the first chapters with explain why that praise. Hope Langston is `recovering on Teardrop Island, Minnesota. `Both her father and her boss had been right. She desperately needed a vacation, away from everything that reminded her of that nasty little Central American country whose policy was to kidnap the wealthy, torture them and apologize later. Two months in their idea of jail should have been enough to kill her, but she had been lucky and lived through it... barely. As her father's closest relative, she should have taken better precautions. He headed an American oil company based in Central America, and the politics there were in constant turmoil. She was just damn lucky she had lived. Other prisoners hadn't.' And on this retreat she encounters, Armand Santeuil - a strange man from the past who calls her by the name of Faith, believing that the past is the present. Or as he states, `Mon Dieu, Cherie. We are not in the future. This is the year 1762. Has that bump affected your memory? Perhaps it is worse than I first believed." Once more he tried to gather her into his arms, but Hope resisted again. "No!" she shouted. "You don't understand! I'm the one who belongs here, not you! This is my time, not yours!" He continued to hold on to her arms, dragging her inexorably against his broad chest. Frantically she glanced around, searching for a weapon, any weapon she could use against him..'  Or as the too brief plot summary states it, `Their time had come. Hope Langston needed to be alone, so she retreated to Minnesota and-her island cottage. But even there, in her private haven, she had no sense of solitude. Something kept beckoning, pulling at her. Someone was watching, waiting .... Armand Santeuil had waited lifetimes for her--the woman he loved with an ageless and burning passion. And finally he had Hope. Nothing would stand in the way of their boundless love, he vowed. Not even destiny . . . .' And from there Estrada develops a steamy sensuous love story that brings past and present into the bliss of the moment. It is a sexy romance, a beautiful sculpted paranormal love story, and it certainly proves that Rita Clay Estrada is one of our more important writers of this genre. Grady Harp, July 14